Lawyer Reacts- Stolen Car Rams Cop (Victim Collects $0).

The woman driving this stolen car is about to put a cop on the hood and rack up a felony charge sheet about a mile long. And here's the part that should genuinely scare you. If she does this to your car instead of a police cruiser, not one single charge on that sheet puts a dollar in your pocket. Not one. So today I want to use this clip to answer a question almost nobody thinks about until it's way too late. When the person who hurt you is broke and stole the car and has no insurance, who actually pays you? I'm Justin Lovely, a personal injury attorney here in South Carolina, and my office has settled thousands of accident cases. Let's get into it. Now I'll tell you right up front, this arrest is out of state. You can tell by the charges they read off at the end. Those aren't our South Carolina statute names, so I'm not going to pretend I tried this case. The lesson travels. It's the same exact problem I watch that hits good people here in South Carolina all the time. So let's watch what happens, and then I'm going to show you the thing that actually protects you. Here's the situation. It's January. A Starbucks parking lot. Dispatch puts out a stolen white Hyundai with two people asleep inside it. Officers roll up expecting the easiest thing in the world. Recover the car. Be done. Watch how fast the easiest thing in the world goes completely sideways. Sleep. Get out of the car, get out of the car, keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. Come out. Come out right now. Oh, we're going to pull you out. Get out of the car. Okay, so right here, so far, this is still just a stolen car. That's a crime against the state. It's not your problem yet. But watch the next few seconds, because this is the exact moment everything changes. Oh! Stop the car! There it is. The second that car moves with officers standing around it, this stopped being a stolen car case. Now you've got assault, you've got reckless driving, and if a human being gets hit, now you've got a serious injury. But I want you to do something for me while we watch the rest. Keep your eyes on the money, not the mugshot, the money. Because everybody watching a clip like this is thinking about jail. I'm thinking about who pays the hospital bill. Get him! Get him! Get him! Hey, put your gun away. Put your gun away. Don't shoot him. Let her go. We're not going to jump on her. Break the window. Hold on. Just stay away from the car. It's not worth getting ran over. Stop and stop! Go back! Get back inside. Get on the ground! Get on your face. Are you okay? What? What? Get on the ground. Get on the ground. Get on the ground! I didn't do anything. Get on the ground! I didn't do anything. Sir. Sir, I didn't do anything. I didn't even fight with you. What am I doing in the middle of the road? Can I please sit? No, you can stand in the second. Do not move. Do you understand? What does she have? Nothing. By the time it was over, she faced a long list of charges. Three counts of aggravated battery, resisting arrest, aggravated DUI, reckless driving, and even criminal damage to government property. One decision led to another, and suddenly, a stolen car at Starbucks turned into a nightmare of felony charges. So look at this list. Three counts of aggravated battery, resisting arrest, DUI, reckless driving, criminal damage to government property. Feels like justice, right? Long list. She's in real trouble. But here's what nobody tells you, and this is the whole point of this video. Every single one of those charges is the state punishing her. It's the government saying you broke the law, you're going to face consequences. Not one of them is about compensating a victim. So play it out. Say she doesn't hit a cruiser. Say she runs over a person in that parking lot. That injured person, with the broken bones and the surgeries and the months out of work, that person collects nothing off this list. Nothing. The criminal case can send her to prison and still leave the victim with a pile of medical bills and zero dollars to pay them. Criminal versus civil. This is the thing I have to explain to people over and over. There are two completely different tracks. There's the criminal side, that's the state versus her, and that's the charges you just heard. And that's about punishment. And then there's the civil side, that's you versus her. And that's the only track that's about getting you paid for what happened to your body and your life. They run on totally separate rails in the United States. She can get convicted on every one of those charges, and you can still walk away with nothing. So now the real question, on the civil side, where does your money actually come from? You can't get blood out of a turnip. Well, normally, it comes from the at-fault driver's insurance policy. That's how this is supposed to work. But look at who we've got here. She stole the car. She's got no job we know of, no insurance, and probably no money. So sure, you can sue her, you can take her to court, you can win, and you can get a big judgment on just a piece of paper with your name on it. And then when you go to collect, there's nothing there. You can't get blood out of a turnip. A judgment against somebody who owns nothing, again, that's just an expensive piece of paper. So if the person who hit you is broke and uninsured, and the at-fault pocket is empty, there's only one pocket left deep enough to actually pay you. And here's the kicker. It's a pocket you already own. Let's talk about U-M and U-I-M. It's your own car insurance. Specifically, two pieces of it that most people never look at, and could not tell you their limits if you asked them that right now. Uninsured motorist coverage, U-M, and underinsured motorist coverage, U-I-M. Here in South Carolina, uninsured motorist coverage is required. You've got it whether you thought about it or not. That's the coverage that steps in when the person who hits you, like this driver, has no insurance at all, or takes off and you never find them. A hit-and-run case, that's your U-M coverage. Underinsured, the U-I-M, that's one, it's optional in South Carolina, and this is where I watch people quietly cost themselves a fortune. U-I-M is what kicks in when the at-fault driver, they do have insurance, but nowhere near enough to cover what they did to you. And here's the trap. People take the bare minimum limits to shave a few dollars off your monthly insurance bill. Then a driver like this, it comes along, and the minimum, that's all you got to work with. We've had clients who get hit by an uninsured or a judgment-proof driver, they thought they were out of luck, and we find real money sitting there in their own U-M or U-I-M coverage that they didn't even know they had. And there's one more piece almost nobody knows to ask about at all. In a lot of situations, you can stack the coverage across your vehicles on your own policy. So if you've got two or three cars insured, that protection can multiply. Now, every policy's different, and the rules matter. That's exactly the kind of thing that you need a lawyer digging through. But the point is this, there's often more coverage available that your insurance company's not going to volunteer to tell you about. They're not going to call you up and say, hey, did you know you can stack your policies? That's on you to know, or on somebody like me to find for you. So here's exactly what I want you to do tonight before you forget about this video. Go pull up your auto policy. I'll wait on you. Find two numbers, your U-M limit and your U-I-M limit. If you can't find them, or you look and they're sitting at the state minimum, call your agent this week and have a real conversation about raising them. Because here's the truth. This clip lays out perfectly. The person who hits you does not get to be careful for you. They don't get to be insured for you. They can be a broke car thief asleep in a stolen Hyundai. And there's not one thing that you can do about that. The only part of this you can control, the only part is what you carry on your own policy before this situation ever happens. So if you've already been hit by a driver like this one in South Carolina, and somebody's told you there's just no money, no insurance, nothing we can do, don't take that as the final answer. That is exactly the situation where we go digging into your own coverage, into stacking, into every pocket in the chain, and we find money other people may miss. Give us a call. We'll give you an honest read on what's actually there. I'm Justin Lovely, and I'll see you on the next one.