Antelope Valley Personal Injury Lawyer

Driver killed, Two Injured in Off-Road Vehicle Collision

Rick Patterson — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:00:50 GMT

Kevin Kramer, 40, of Los Angeles, was killed when the dune buggy he was driving collided with a second off-road vehicle. The crash occured at around 6:30 p.m. on Saturday on a dirt road in the the Jaw Bone Canyon Off Highway Vehicle Area.

Kramer was traveling northbound on a dirt road when his vehicle started to slide as he rounded a corner. His vehicle crossed into the path of a second vehicle driven by Marshall Bennett, 58, of Pasadena, traveling southbound on the same road.

Kramer's dune buggy overturned resulting in fatal injuries. Bennett suffered major injuries and was airlifted to Antelope Valley Hospital by Mercy Air.

A passenger riding with Bennett was identified as Alan Perkins, 21, of Los Angeles. Perkins suffered moderate injuries and was transported to Antelope Valley Hospital.

All occupants were wearing seatbelts, and alcohol does not appear to be a factor. The collision remains under investigation.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Three Killed in San Bernardino Small Plane Crash

Rick Patterson — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:41:00 GMT

According to FAA spokesman Ian Gregor, all three people were killed in a small plane crash Sunday. The accident occured 2.5 miles east of the Barstow-Daggett Airport in San Bernardino County, officials said.

The plane, believed to be a Cessna 210, was headed from John Wayne Airport in Tustin to Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas when it crashed about 12:40 p.m., said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department reported that the aircraft was fully engulfed in flames, Gregor said.

Both the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. Neither agency releases the identities of crash victims, Gregor said.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Motorcyclist Killed in Hit-and-run in West Los Angeles

Rick Patterson — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:43:00 GMT

A motorcyclist was killed in a hit-and-run accident in West Los Angeles on Sunday at the intersection of Jefferson Blvd. and Mesmer Avenue. Police continue to search for the driver of the 2001 BMW that turned left into the victim riding his 2007 R1 motorcycle. The accident occured around 3:05 pm.

Officers respoded to a collision call where they found the victim unresponsive next to his motorcycle. The man was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Anyone with information about the accident should contact investigators at (213) 473-0228, or Crimestoppers at (800) 222-8477.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Bakersfeld Woman Suffers Major Injuries After Being Struck by SUV

Rick Patterson — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:11:00 GMT

Synuon Suon, 28, of Bakersfield was walking in a marked crosswalk on Lake Street when she was hit at 6:30 p.m., according to a California Highway Patrol news release. She suffered major injuries to her head, neck, back and pelvis and was taken to Kern Medical Center.

The driver of the SUV, Donald Foster, 69, of Bakersfield, had been traveling at 35 mph south on Mount Vernon Avenue, the news release said. As he approached Lake Street, he saw a bicyclist stopped in the center median of Mount Vernon Avenue and within the crosswalk. The rider appeared to have been traveling in an easterly direction.

Foster began to slow down and was traveling at 30 mph as he crossed into the intersection, the news release said. As he approached the crosswalk, he noticed a figure on the right side of his vehicle and hit his brakes but was unable to stop in time.

Suon was hit by the right front and windshield of the SUV, the news release said. Alcohol does not appear to be a factor in the collision.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Three Injured in Ridgecrest Collision

Rick Patterson — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:01:00 GMT

At 12:23 p.m. Thursday, a 2007 Toyota Camry driven by Bahzad Ali of Fort Irwin was traveling south on China Lake Boulevard and stopped at the intersection of Highway 395 in the Ridgecrest area.

Ali accelerated and began a left turn to travel southbound on Highway 395. He entered the intersection directly in the path of a 2011 Toyota Sienna traveling northbound on the highway.

The Sienna, driven by Richard Chung, of Brea, collided with the Camry. The Sienna left the roadway and overturned.

Bahzad Ali and his passenger, Nicholas Adams, suffered minor injuries.

Chung received no apparent injuries, but a passenger, Grace Chung, suffered major injuries.

Alcohol does not appear to be a factor. An investigation is ongoing.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

NYT: A Pinpoint Beam Strays Invisibly, Harming Instead of Healing

Rick Patterson — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:40:00 GMT

The initial accident report offered few details, except to say that an unidentified hospital had administered radiation overdoses to three patients during identical medical procedures.

Terri Anderson was given too much radiation last year while being treated for a benign tumor. She now suffers facial spasms. “I started having 12 to 14 of those a day,” she said.

It was not until many months later that the full import of what had happened in the hospital last year began to surface in urgent nationwide warnings, which advised doctors to be extra vigilant when using a particular device that delivers high-intensity, pinpoint radiation to vulnerable parts of the body.

Marci Faber was one of the three patients. She had gone to Evanston Hospital in Illinois seeking treatment for pain emanating from a nerve deep inside her head. Today, she is in a nursing home, nearly comatose, unable to speak, eat or walk, leaving her husband to care for their three young daughters.

Two other patients were overdosed before the hospital realized that the device, a linear accelerator, had inexplicably allowed radiation to spill outside a heavy metal cone attachment that was supposed to channel the beam to a specific spot in the brain. One month later, the same accident happened at another hospital.

The treatment Ms. Faber received, stereotactic radiosurgery, or SRS, is one of the fastest-growing radiation therapies, a technological innovation designed to target tiny tumors and other anomalies affecting the brain or spinal cord, while minimizing damage to surrounding tissue.

Because the radiation is so concentrated and intense, accuracy is especially important. Yet, according to records and interviews, the SRS unit at Evanston lacked certain safety features, including those that might have prevented radiation from leaking outside the cone.

The mistakes in Evanston involve linear accelerators — commonly used for standard radiation therapy — that were redesigned by the manufacturer, Varian Medical Systems, so they could also perform SRS. As the devices became more versatile and complex, problems arose when vital electronic components could not communicate with one another.

In the last five years, SRS systems made by Varian and its frequent German partner, Brainlab, have figured in scores of errors and overdoses, The New York Times has found. Some mistakes were caused by operator error. In Missouri, for example, 76 patients were overradiated because a medical physicist did not realize that the smaller radiation beam used in radiosurgery had to be calibrated differently than the larger beam used for more traditional radiation therapy.

Medical physicists say there is nothing inherently wrong with linear accelerators that deliver general radiation therapy, as well as SRS. And, they say, the overdoses might have been caught had users followed a more rigorous system of checks and double-checks.

“Tens of thousands of patients have been treated with protocols properly followed and no mistakes were made,” said Dr. Frank J. Bova, a medical physicist in Gainesville, Fla., and a pioneer in developing and enhancing the accuracy of SRS. “It has changed many difficult procedures, ones with high surgical risk, into one-day outpatient procedures.”

But radiation safety experts say the retrofitted devices made up of different companies’ products present a special challenge.

Dr. Howard I. Amols, chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said some problems appeared to be “a combination of user error, coupled with neither the manufacturers nor the F.D.A. being able to anticipate a potential safety flaw in a ‘mix and match’ treatment delivery system.”

Dr. William David Bloomer, chairman of radiation medicine at Evanston Hospital, said the mistakes happened even though medical personnel there had followed the manufacturer’s instructions. “We rely on them to make sure the medical devices are safe,” he said.

Varian, the world’s leading manufacturer of linear accelerators, declined to be interviewed, but said in a statement that it has “deep concern” for accident victims and their families. “Our products include many built-in safety features, and we work continually to make them even safer,” Varian said.

Brainlab denied any role in the accidents.

The accidents highlight shortcomings in the regulation of medical radiation.

Despite their complexity, the multipurpose devices are less regulated than their more simply designed competitor, the Gamma Knife, a device engineered specifically for stereotactic radiosurgery.

Linear accelerators, which generate radiation without using radioactive material, are overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, while the Gamma Knife is regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because it uses a radioactive isotope. The nuclear commission has more authority to investigate and publicize radiation errors.

The F.D.A. approved the retrofitted linear accelerators with little review on the grounds that they were mere extensions of existing technology.

But since there is no requirement that all mistakes involving linear accelerators be reported to a central database, getting a handle on how often SRS errors occur is difficult. “Everybody says these are isolated incidents,” Dr. Bloomer said, “until you find out that maybe they are not so isolated.”

Seeking Respite From Pain

Before Marci Faber became a nursing home invalid at age 50, she had been leading a rich, full life. She loved musicals, country music and anything to do with her three daughters. When a mother was needed to oversee the sale of Girl Scout cookies, Ms. Faber was there.

“We go into a room and people really didn’t care so much about me — Marci was definitely the person that people gravitated to,” said Richard Faber, her husband. “She was gregarious, had a great smile. Her eyes light up the room.”

Last March, Ms. Faber sought treatment for trigeminal neuralgia, a non-life-threatening condition that produces facial pain. While Ms. Faber’s pain was intermittent, some cases become severe.

“It’s unimaginably bad and can drive some people to suicide,” said Dr. Daniel Yoshor, chief of neurosurgery at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston. “It’s an awful, awful thing and the cause of it is not very well understood.”

What is known is that the pain emanates from the tiny trigeminal nerve at the base of the brain. And stereotactic radiosurgery is one of the most effective methods of eliminating the source of the pain.

But treating trigeminal neuralgia “is probably the most technically demanding” form of radiosurgery, said Dr. Bova. “You are literally giving doses that are very, very high,” he said, “and the machine has to be able to deliver the dose to the trigeminal nerve and stay off the brain stem, which is immediately adjacent to it.”

Standard radiation therapy can involve dozens of treatments at lower doses, so one incorrect treatment might not cause much damage. But with SRS, there is often just a single potent dose requiring scalpel-like accuracy.

“It requires a little different mindset than when you are actually saying, I will give a little dose today, a little dose tomorrow and I will check it later,” Dr. Bova said. “This has to be checked the first time you do it because there is not a second day.”

For years, the Gamma Knife provided the necessary power and accuracy to accomplish its goal.

But many institutions could not afford it; the device costs upwards of $3 million and requires its own room, and treatments take longer. There is also the added difficulty of handling and replacing radioactive material.

“It doesn’t pay to have a Gamma Knife unless you have a large number of patients,” said Dr. Amols.

By using linear accelerators retrofitted with cone attachments, hospitals expanded their pool of patients without having to buy an extra unit.

Radiosurgery appeals to patients because it is an alternative to surgery and can be performed as an outpatient procedure, often in a single day. In recent years, the use of these small beam treatments has soared, as doctors have begun using them on parts of the body other than the brain and spine.

When Ms. Faber entered Evanston Hospital in March 2009, she had every reason to believe that her treatment would put an end to her pain. Indeed, when she left the hospital her trigeminal nerve was no longer an issue.

Little Problems Get Bigger

At first, Ms. Faber had no reason to be especially concerned. After her procedure, she experienced some vomiting, burning in her throat, and even a little weight loss. Swatches of hair began to fall out.

Still, the Fabers did not connect any of this to her radiation treatment.

But weeks later, as the hospital was on the verge of overradiating a fourth radiosurgery patient, its medical physicist caught the problem. He fixed it, and the patient received the correct dose.

But the hospital temporarily shut down its stereotactic radiosurgery program and began to investigate. What it found was deeply disturbing: three patients, including Ms. Faber, had been overradiated around the same time. All the victims were notified.

Evanston Hospital declined to discuss specific cases on privacy grounds, but a brief report sent to the F.D.A. in 2009 said one patient had been hospitalized three weeks after treatment with an irregular heartbeat, weakness, and changes in mental status; another was hospitalized for four days because of nausea, vomiting and dehydration; and the third, apparently Ms. Faber, was said to have experienced hair loss.

But about a year after her treatment, Mr. Faber said, his wife began losing her balance, falling occasionally and having memory problems. “I was sick to my stomach — scared,” he said.

Jordan Kagan, a family friend, said that when Ms. Faber attended his daughter’s bat mitzvah in April, she was mentally coherent but physically diminished.

Then, in what seemed like a blink of an eye, she disintegrated. “Four weeks later, she was like a vegetable,” Mr. Kagan said. “It was mind-boggling to see one person who was not elderly deteriorate that quickly.”

Now, she can only blink her eyes and lightly squeeze her husband’s hand. “It is very hard on the kids,” Mr. Faber said. “It has been hard on me but really nothing compared to what Marci is going through.”

Doctors who deal with her type of radiation injury say the prognosis for any meaningful recovery is poor.

At the hospital, officials had been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. While the software that drives the linear accelerator is complex, the mechanics of how the overdoses occurred is strikingly simple.

Linear accelerators can be adapted to perform stereotactic radiosurgery in two ways: with small computer-controlled metal leaves that shape the beam, or with a cone attached to the machine’s opening through which radiation is delivered. That opening is made smaller or larger by moving four heavy metal “jaws” that shape the beam into a square. When a cone attachment is used, the square beam must fit entirely within the circumference of the cone. If the square is slightly larger than the cone, radiation will leak out through the four corners of the jaws and irradiate healthy tissue. In the Evanston accidents, records show, the beam was four times too large.

Operators could not see this incorrect setting directly because a metal tray on which the cone is mounted hides the jaws, though the settings should have been displayed on a computer screen, according to people who have worked with this device. The mount also blocks a light field that could have shown where the radiation was to hit the patient.

But while the mount blocks light, it does not block radiation, which in the case of Ms. Faber and other Evanston patients went into healthy brain cells.

Determining that the jaws had been set wrong was the easy part. Then the hospital had to figure out how and why.

A Failure to Communicate

Precisely why the jaws were open so wide is still in dispute. There is no indication that the State of Illinois or the F.D.A. has investigated the accident. No lawsuits have been filed. And Varian has declined to answer questions.

But public records and interviews with doctors and others familiar with Varian’s equipment point to a complicated matrix of computer systems and communication flaws that made such an accident more likely to happen.

That system is supposed to work this way: A treatment plan is developed on one computer, then transferred into another software system that, among other things, verifies that the treatment plan matches the doctor’s prescription. The data is then sent to a third computer that controls the linear accelerator.

Several months after the Evanston accidents, Brainlab reminded customers to verify the correct jaw setting, specifically citing the possibility that treatment information could be altered as it passed “through a chain of devices.”

Evanston Hospital had earlier encountered its own communication glitches after upgrading Varian software in December 2008. As a result, medical personnel had to load patient information onto a USB flash drive and walk it from one computer to another.

Then, three months ago, concerned that radiation might leak outside the cone, Varian warned customers that its software did not recognize cone attachments on the type of linear accelerator involved in the Evanston accidents.

To work around that problem hospitals needed to, as one medical physicist put it, essentially trick the machine into thinking it was using a different attachment, which it did recognize. To do that, users had to enter additional data into the SRS system.

Similar communication problems affected three other Varian brands of linear accelerators.

“If you weren’t careful, you could give the wrong treatment,” said Dr. Subhash C. Sharma, chief physicist at Parkview Comprehensive Cancer Center in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Last year, Varian promised to devise, among other things, a decidedly low-tech solution: a decal to stick on the machines, warning operators to be extra careful in setting the radiation field.

Dr. Bloomer, the radiation oncologist at Evanston Hospital, said the manufacturer had not answered the hospital’s questions about why the overdoses occurred there. “We haven’t gotten an adequate response,” he said.

Dr. Amols, the Sloan Kettering physicist, said he believed several factors could have contributed to the accidents.

“Arguably, the physicist or radiation therapist should have noticed that there was a mismatch,” Dr. Amols said, “and arguably there should be stricter laws regulating the ‘mixing and matching’ of complex medical equipment from different manufacturers. But at present there’s no legal requirement for different companies to make equipment integration transparent to the end user — i.e., the hospitals.”

After the accidents at Evanston, Brainlab and Varian this year released a software fix that will restrict the jaw size, so similar accidents will not occur, said David Brett, a Brainlab official. So far, 75 percent of the affected machines have incorporated the fix, the company said.

Dozens Are Overradiated

While Evanston and its suppliers were dealing with the fallout of the overdose cases there, a different problem involving the retrofitted linear accelerators had been unfolding at CoxHealth, a hospital in Springfield, Mo.

Earlier this year, CoxHealth announced that it had overradiated 76 patients, most of whom had brain cancer, during SRS treatments. The overdoses had continued for five years because the hospital did not realize that its radiation therapy equipment had been set up incorrectly.

The hospital’s medical physicist, who was apparently accustomed to calibrating larger radiation beams, did not realize that smaller beams needed to be handled differently, radiation experts say.

A hospital spokesman said the physicist used the wrong calibration tool to set up the machine, causing the overdoses.

“They were supposed to have switched over to a smaller detector,” said Dr. Brad Bradshaw, a lawyer, who represents many of the overdosed patients. “The larger detector gave them a false reading.”

Terri Anderson, 54, was overradiated at Cox last year while undergoing SRS treatment for a benign tumor. After her treatments, she began experiencing facial spasms. “I started having 12 to 14 of those a day,” Ms. Anderson said. She says she also developed balance and memory problems.

Dr. Bradshaw, who represents Ms. Anderson, said parts of her brain had received overdoses ranging from 25 percent to 100 percent.

A similar calibration problem involving a Brainlab and Varian unit was discovered in April 2007 at a hospital in Toulouse, France, where overdoses — smaller than those in Missouri — had occurred for a year, affecting 145 patients. These SRS treatments used tiny metal leaves to shape the beam.

“There were strong similarities between what happened in Missouri and what happened in Toulouse,” said Dr. Ola Holmberg, who heads the radiation protection unit for patients at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But without a requirement that accidents and near-misses be reported, other hospitals cannot learn from these mistakes, Dr. Holmberg said.

“There is no effective way now of sharing the information or learning in a systematic way,” Dr. Holmberg said. “If something happens, such as Evanston, I would have wanted to know about it at the time.”

That point was echoed by Dr. Benjamin Movsas, chairman of the department of radiation oncology at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. “I was not able to find any information about Evanston,” Dr. Movsas said. “It’s frustrating. We didn’t know there was a problem.”

Earlier this year, the American Society for Radiation Oncology called for the establishment of the nation’s first central database for the reporting of errors involving linear accelerators. So far that hasn’t happened.

“The system does need to change,” Dr. Movsas said. “Reporting needs to be transparent and mandatory.” He added: “We need regulations — that has to happen. It’s better for me and it’s better for my patients.”

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

FDA Issues Warning Letters to Makers of Caffeinated Alcoholic Beverages

Rick Patterson — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:13:00 GMT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration told the manufacturers of seven caffeinated alcoholic beverages Wednesday that their drinks are a "public health concern" and can't stay on the market in their current form.

The move follows a year-long review by the FDA, which gave the companies 15 days to either reformulate their products or face possible seizure under federal law, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the agency's principal deputy commissioner. Experts have said the caffeine used in the beverages can mask the effects of alcohol, leaving drinkers unaware of how intoxicated they are.

"FDA does not find support for the claim that the addition of caffeine to these alcoholic beverages is 'generally recognized as safe,' which is the legal standard," Sharfstein told reporters. "To the contrary, there is evidence that the combinations of caffeine and alcohol in these products pose a public health concern."

One of the companies that received warning letters was Phusion Projects, of Chicago, Illinois, which makes Four Loko -- a drink nicknamed "blackout in a can" by some users. The company announced Tuesday that it was dropping caffeine and two other ingredients, guarana and taurine, from Four Loko in the face of "a difficult and politically-charged regulatory environment."

The other companies are San Diego, California-based United Brands, which manufactures the Joose and Max brands; Portland, Oregon's Charge Beverages Corp., which sells Core High Gravity HG, Core High Gravity HG Orange, and Lemon Lime Core Spiked; and New Century Brewing of Boston, Massachusetts, which makes Moonshot.

Sharfstein called Phusion's decision to drop caffeine and two other ingredients a "positive step" Wednesday. And in a statement issued after the decision, the company said it was pleased by FDA's response.

"As we stated yesterday, we have stopped the production and shipment of all our products containing these ingredients," the company said. "We will continue to work closely and cooperatively with national and state regulators."

But New Century proprietor Rhonda Kallman told CNN she was puzzled by the FDA's decision to include Moonshot on its list.

"I don't know what to say except I'm really shocked about the outcome of the FDA's inquiry, and I need more answers than what I've gotten," said Kallman, who said she is New Century's only full-time employee.

Kallman described Moonshot as a craft beer that has about 4 percent alcohol by weight, about two-thirds the caffeine of a cup of coffee and is sold in only three cities -- "and yet it's being singled out with Four Loko and Joose."

"Those brands are neon green. They're not beer, they're juice, with 200 grams of sodium and artificial everything," she said.

United Brands said Tuesday that it would review any new FDA guidelines, but noted it was unaware "of a single incident of injury or other harm associated with its products." Neither United nor Charge Beverages had responded to requests for comment after the announcement.

The FDA has no authority to ban the products outright. But Sharfstein said the review is still going on, and "We expect these warning letters to be read across the industry."

"This will send a message to the industry about the importance of looking directly at these alcoholic beverages and how the FDA will respond to that," he said.

The FDA began its review in November 2009, after complaints from officials in several states. The controversy exploded in October, when nine underage students at Central Washington University were hospitalized after drinking Four Loko, both on its own and mixed with other drinks, police reported.

Critics say drinks like Four Loko mix caffeine equal to the amount in three cups of coffee with the alcoholic equivalent of three cans of beer and are designed to appeal to younger consumers accustomed to consuming high-caffeine energy drinks. A 23.5-ounce can of Four Loko contains either 6 or 12 percent alcohol by volume, depending on state regulations.

Phusion has compared Four Loko to popular drinks like rum and cola or Irish coffee that also mix caffeine and alcohol. But "we didn't see these kinds of events when people were drinking irish coffees," Robert McKenna, Washington's state attorney general, told reporters.

"What we're seeing now is striking, and we need to take quick action," McKenna said.

Washington and four other states -- New York, Utah, Michigan and Oklahoma -- already have taken steps to remove Four Loko and similar drinks from store shelves. And Gil Kerlikowske, the White House anti-drug czar, praised the FDA for moving against products he said are "designed, branded, and promoted to encourage binge drinking."

"Acting early to protect public health is critical and a vital component of the Obama administration's effort to reduce drug use and its consequences," he said.

Combining large amounts of caffeine and alcohol produces "a wide-awake drunk," said Dr. Mary Claire O'Brien, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest University's medical school in North Carolina. But since caffeine's effect wears off faster than alcohol's, she said, drinkers are left with "much more alcohol than he would have been able to tolerate -- and that leads to blackouts."

"If you're going to drink caffeine, drink it responsibly. If you're going to drink alcohol, drink it responsibly," said O'Brien, who has studied the drinks extensively. "But mixing them is dangerous, because you might not know when you've had too much to drink."

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Austrailian Man Charged in Fatal Hit-and-run

Rick Patterson — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:21:00 GMT

Prosecutors charged an Australian businessman with a felony hit-and-run charge in connection with the death of a 21-year-old woman who was struck and killed by the driver of a Bentley last week in West Hollywood, a spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney's office said Monday.

Ryan Bowman, 43, was released from custody Monday afternoon after posting $50,000 bail, which had been reduced from $2 million. Bowman did not enter a plea to the hit-and-run charge put forward by prosecutors. He is scheduled to return Jan. 4 to Beverly Hills Superior Court.]

Bowman was behind the wheel of a Bentley that slammed into Lauren Ann Freeman as she was in the crosswalk at Hammond Street about 11:50 p.m. Wednesday, authorities said. Freeman's body was thrown about 50 feet.

Sheriff's investigators said Bowman sped away in the car, and that debris found at the scene suggested that the vehicle could have been a dark-colored Bentley. Investigators said they found a Bentley abandoned in a residential neighborhood near the intersection of Melrose Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard, about 1 1/2 miles from the incident.

Bowman is a director of Zeal Entertainment, a Sydney Australia based company that provides content licensing agreements for mobile phone companies. The company owns the rights to "Girls Gone Wild" for Australia.

John Nazarian, a Beverly Hills private detective who is representing Freeman's family, said the woman left the concert early because she had to get up early for an internship.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson

Blue Line Train Collides with Car Injuring Four

Greg Owen — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:38:00 GMT

Four people were injured Wednesday afternoon when a light-rail commuter train collided with a car in downtown Los Angeles, authorities said.

Police believe the driver of the car attempted an illegal left turn about 3:15 p.m. in front of the Metro Blue Line train as it traveled south on Flower Street near the 18th Street intersection, Metro spokesman Rick Jager said.

The driver of the car was seriously injured and taken to a hospital, Los Angeles City Fire spokesman Erik Scott said. Two passengers on the train suffered non-life threatening injuries and were also taken to hospitals. A third passenger had minor injuries and was treated at the scene. All of the victims complained of neck and back injuries, Jager said.

The train was at half-capacity with about 150 people on board, Jager said. A different train was sent to cover its route and commuters experienced a 20-minute delay.

The crash is still under investigation. The names and ages of the victims were not given.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Greg Owen

Three Vehicle Crash Causes Delay on Pasadena Gold Line

Rick Patterson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:11:00 GMT

A Thursday-morning crash involving a car, a big rig and a pickup truck on the eastbound 210 Freeway in Pasadena snarled traffic and caused delays on the Metro Gold Line, after two of the vehicles ended up on the tracks, authorities said.

Quoting witnesses, the California Highway Patrol said the driver of a green Toyota Camry made an unsafe lane-change, cutting off the big rig. Both vehicles spun out of control, with the big-rig driver swerving to the left and pushing a Chevrolet pickup truck onto the tracks between Sierra Madre Villa Station and Allen Station on the Gold Line.

The big rig also ended up on the tracks, said CHP spokesman Ming Hsu. The accident occurred about 8 a.m.

No one appeared to be seriously hurt, Hsu said, but the driver and a passenger from the pickup truck, as well as the big-rig driver, were transported to Huntington Memorial Hospital for a check.

Traffic on the eastbound side of the 210 was backed up, causing at least an hour's delay, Hsu said. The carpool lane and lanes one and two would be closed until at least 11:30 a.m., according to CHP reports. Westbound traffic was slow "due to looky-loos," Hsu said.

No trains were involved in the incident, but Gold Line service will be delayed up to 20 minutes due to damage to the tracks, said Luis Inzunza, a spokesman for the agency.

Metro Rail trains were being returned from Allen Station, and Metro buses were providing a shuttle service between the Allen and Sierra Madre Villa stations, Metro officials said.

Inzunza said authorities estimated that it would take at least four hours to clear the tracks.

Originally posted at The Legal Examiner by Rick Patterson