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Three drivers to pay for road death
By Xu Fan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-26 07:52
Three drivers have been ordered to pay 240,000 yuan in compensation to the family of a drunken man who died after being run over multiple times in Haidian district.
At least two cars and a truck hit Hao Lianjie, a 27-year-old construction worker from Bazhou in Hebei province, as he lay on Baiyunqiaoxi on May 8 at 00.35 am.
Police said Hao's blood alcohol content was 253.9 mg per 100 ml - almost 13 times over the legal limit.
At a compensation hearing at Haidian district court on Monday, judge Li Hongyu was told that many cars could have driven over Hao, resulting in his death, but that only three drivers stopped their vehicles and called police.
Li ordered those drivers, including motorist Yang Xi, truck driver Yin Jiazhang, and taxi driver Chen Zengjiang to pay Hao's relatives 240,000 yuan within 15 days.
The court found that all three vehicles had defective headlights.
"On a darkened road without street lamps, headlights are very important for safe driving. Even if three vehicles are found with no defects, they cannot be exempted from responsibility. There can only can be diminished responsibility," Li said.
"The three drivers didn't pay enough attention to safe driving and so didn't see Hao in time and didn't adopt effective measures to prevent the following vehicles from running over him, so they should have some responsibility."
However, all three drivers have denied responsibility for Hao's death. The trio said their vehicles passed annual checks and the headlights could have been damaged when they ran over Hao.
"But I estimate our company won't pay the compensation because we do not have responsibility. We may appeal," a spokesman said yesterday.
Shi Lu, Hao's 47-year-old uncle, said his nephew was partly to blame for his death but the drivers also had a duty of care.
"No one knows if my nephew was still alive when the first car run over him. If Yang stopped his car and tried to prevent the following cars from running over him, he might have survived," Shi said outside court.
Yang told the court that he had been driving his father's car and saw something shaped like a large sack on the road about 2 m ahead of his vehicle.
He said that he was unable to stop the car in such a short distance so tried to ensure that the wheels of his car did not touch the object. However, when the wheels ran over the object anyway, he stopped the car and realized it was a person.
Yang said at this point he got back into his car and called the police. He then saw another three vehicles run over Hao, the court was told.
"First a blue van stopped and the driver asked me what had happened. Then a gold mini bus ran over Hao but the driver didn't stop and it was too dark for me to see the license plate. The third one was a cab and the driver stopped. The police came to the scene after 10 minutes," Yang told the court.
Yang said that he believed Hao to be already dead when he called police because another motorist had also reported a person lying on the road to officers.
The court was told that truck driver Yin and taxi driver Chen also pulled their vehicles to the side of the road and called police.
Shi said Hao was the oldest son in his single-parent family and started working in Beijing two years ago.
"My nephew was definitely not an alcoholic and I hardly ever saw him drunk," Shi said. "As far as I'm concerned, my nephew was under big financial pressures as his family owed 20,000 yuan on a 90,000 yuan debt related to his father's medical expenses before his death in 2005. So we guess he may have drowned his sorrows."
