Thread: Three People Pulled From Burning Car

Published on Dec 21, 2012
A Good Samaritan helped free a passenger from a burning car in Jupiter, Florida while police pulled the driver and another passenger to safety. The entire incident was captured on a police officer's dashboard camera. (Dec. 21)

Originally Posted by keith1569

Ya man same as the guy going to break into someone's house fell through the skylight and sued and won

That was the story I read! Wasn't there something about rainwater and dog food? lol

(Googles)

Wow. Old story? No dog food or rain of any kind included, though.

"Ricky Bodine was a 19-year-old high-school graduate who, with three other friends (one of whom had a criminal record), decided the night of March 1, 1982, to steal a floodlight from the roof of the Enterprise High School gymnasium.

Ricky climbed the roof, removed the floodlight, lowered it to the ground to his friends, and, as he was walking across the roof (perhaps to steal a second floodlight), he fell through the skylight.

Bodine suffered terrible injuries to be sure, (snip) became a spastic quadriplegic. (snip) Bodine sued for $8 million (in 1984 dollars, about $16 million today) and settled for the nuisance sum of $260,000 plus $1200/month for life, about the equivalent of a million dollars in conservatively-estimated 2006 present value.

In other words, a burglar fell through a skylight, and blamed the skylight?s owners for his injuries; because the law permits such suits, and because the law does not compensate defendants for successful defenses, Bodine had the ability to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers for injuries suffered in the course of his own criminal behavior."

More @ The burglar and the skylight: another debunking that isn’t - Overlawyered