When The At-Fault Driver Blames You - Say This!.

The other driver blew through a red light, side swiped, you had to go to the emergency room, and now they're telling the insurance company that it was all your fault. They flipped the script on you. You're angry, you're upset, you're concerned. You have no idea how this happened. You thought they were going to be honest like they were at the scene of the accident. I'm Shane McGuire, a personal injury lawyer here in Texas, and I've represented hundreds of people who have been in this very situation where somebody else blows through an intersection, runs a red light, totals their car, and on the back end, tries to blame my client for causing the wreck. In this video, I'm going to show you how to avoid the pitfalls that can happen when an at-fault driver tries to blame you when they ran the red light. Have you ever wondered why drivers lie at the scene of a wreck? This joker blew through a red light, smashed your car, and now he's going to tell the police officer, hey, no, she did it. She's the one who ran the red light. He knows what happened. Shoot, he was probably texting. He was probably looking around, daydreaming, whatever it is he was doing. He's at fault. He should know he's at fault, but now he's blaming you. Why do they do it? There's a lot of reasons. One is nobody just wants to take responsibility anymore. It's not like when you and I were growing up, when our parents told us the difference between right and wrong. Nowadays, people just want to hide. They want to make sure they're protected. They're only looking out for themselves. There has been a loss of personal responsibility in our society, and I'm telling you it happens all the time when some fool runs a red light and hits one of my clients. Okay, so they've run the red light. They've hit you. They get out of the car. They start blaming you, and you're like, why is this happening? You have to ask yourself, what do I do in this situation? How do I protect myself? Well, I'm going to tell you where it starts. Start by looking around for witnesses. There are still good Samaritans in this world. There are still people who do something other than rubberneck when they're driving past a wreck, and they'll stop and talk to you, make sure you're okay, check on you. In that moment, and listen, I know it's hard to think about in the moment, but if you prepare yourself now, you'll be ready then. All right? So what you need to do is talk to witnesses. Did you see what happened? He ran the red light, right? Yeah, he ran the red light. Get their phone number. You know, a lot of times somebody doesn't want to stay around for when a police officer may show up. They have wives. They may be picking up a child at daycare. Maybe they don't have time to wait 30 minutes for a police officer to show up and work a wreck that they didn't cause and didn't injure them. We can't expect them to stay around for 30 minutes. What they will do is shoot you a text with their name and phone number and just a brief description of what they saw. That way you've got it. In the meantime, this joker is telling everybody that it wasn't his fault. Okay, look around. What's around you? I'm telling you at so many intersections nowadays, there are gas stations or other businesses that have cameras on the intersection. So this happened in a case that I had settled last year. I had a sweet lady and she's just driving home, doing the mom thing. She's got two kids in the car and a guy in a company vehicle runs a red light and hits her. She's turning left. He's got a protected arrow and this guy's just flying through, pops her and he gets out of the car and he says, not my fault. Now, once we get into the case, we see that he's caused another wreck in a company vehicle. We see that the company had failed on various aspects of training. We see that he was driving the vehicle that day in a space that he wasn't supposed to be driving it in. He was on some sort of detour and was operating it in such a way that it got him fired ultimately, even if he hadn't caused the wreck. But my client was very savvy in that moment and she went to one of the gas stations on the corner. It happened that one corner didn't have video, but the other corner did have video and the video they had, it didn't show her protected arrow, but it showed his red light. And what happened was she said to the officer, hey, this gas station has video. Officer walks up, actually worked out really great. We didn't get the video from the gas station. What we got was the body cam from the officer. The officer goes into the back and says, hey, can I see the video? They show the video. It's on the officer's body cam so that when we order the records from the police department, it's right there. And that guy, I'm telling you, even confronted with video evidence, still maintained that he didn't run a red light, even though they're like, hey, look, there's a police video of you running a red light. And he's just like, I didn't do it. Now, indisputable video evidence is the highest standard of proof in America. It's dawned on me the other day. Okay. So in a car wreck case, just any civil litigation case, whether it's JP court, like Judge Judy, or whether it's a car wreck, like what I do for a living, the standard is preponderance of the evidence, meaning more likely than not. In certain family law situations, it's clear and convincing evidence, meaning not beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's gotta be better than just 51%. And then to put somebody in jail, you have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, meaning, okay, you can have a doubt, but if it's a reasonable doubt, you can't put it in prison. Now, the greatest standard of proof is not actually in the justice system. It's actually in the national football league, where to overturn a call on the field, you need indisputable video evidence. Have you ever thought about that? It takes greater proof to overturn an out of bounds call. When you kind of know what happened, you just don't have the right camera angle. You know what occurred. There's no reasonable doubt about what occurred. You know what happened, but because they don't have the right angle, they won't overturn the call. We had indisputable video evidence. The guy still wouldn't admit it. What do you do? So here's what you do. You show it to the insurance company, you show it to the risk manager at the big company he worked for, and they ultimately pay our client because our client up front did what so many people don't. They did their own investigation at the scene, was savvy to go to that gas station and say, hey, do you have video of this intersection? Hey, if insurance companies always did the right thing, I wouldn't even have a job because people would just be so happy when they talk to these insurance companies. Their property damage would be paid. Their medical bills would be paid. They'd get reasonable compensation for pain and suffering. But man, that ain't how life works. So you need to protect yourself on the front end and gather the evidence that you need. And when that insurance company denies the claim because their insured has now said, no, I didn't run that red light. She did. That's when you call a personal injury lawyer. You got to export that stress in your life. You don't need to be stressed out dealing with an insurance company who has found a frivolous reason to deny your claim. You let us do that. We will build the evidence. We will present the claim, and then we will show them how foolish they were to deny the reality that was right in front of their face, video evidence of the wreck, credible eyewitness testimony from bystanders who were at the scene, a crash report from a police officer who's been trained in how to properly investigate a crash and accurately ascertain who's at fault. Okay. A question I get all the time, and it's almost embarrassing. I get it all the time because you would think my friends and family who asked me this would just know, but they don't. Maybe I haven't made a compelling enough case for them. I don't know, but here's what I'm going to ask. Hey, I've been in this wreck. The other side is blaming me for the wreck, even though it's clearly their fault. When should I hire a lawyer? You should have already hired a lawyer. The reality is after the wreck, you gather your evidence, you go get medical treatment. That night, the next day, you need to be reaching out to a personal injury lawyer. Believe it or not, that insurance company is already playing defense and already trying to minimize the value of your claim before you even know it. You need to get somebody on your side who's proactively pushing your case and maximizing the value of your claim so that you can get the treatment you need and the compensation that you deserve. In the situation where the at-fault driver is blaming you for a wreck, you may have had the presence of mind to look at the video footage at the convenience store, at the intersection of the wreck. You may have had the presence of mind to get the cell number and maybe even a description via text of how the wreck happened from one of the bystanders. What you don't know how to do is to get the video in admissible form under an affidavit. What you don't know how to do is issue a subpoena to one of those witnesses to make sure that they testify or to get an affidavit from them that you can present to the insurance. You don't know how to do that. And you know what? You don't want to learn how to do that. You don't want to be some YouTube lawyer who just Googles stuff and tries to figure it out that way. It's a disaster if you try to do it yourself. You will end up regretting it and then you're hiring somebody like me to clean up a mistake. And you don't want to do that because it's too hard to do on the back end. Instead, early on after the wreck, reach out to a personal injury lawyer, somebody who knows what they're doing, who's handled thousands of these cases, who knows that it's kind of par for the course when somebody doesn't take responsibility for their acts. And we'll gather the evidence for you and we'll make sure that you get paid at the end of the day. All right. Let me tell you a couple of things not to do after a wreck where somebody else starts blaming you, even though it's their fault. Number one, don't get angry. I know that's a tough one. I know it's hard not to get angry. We all have a sense of justice. And when somebody is blaming you for something you didn't do, nothing gets the Irish up in me like that. And I know that's true for everybody. It's offensive. And it's just unjust when somebody starts blaming you for something that's their fault. It's unbelievable. It happens all the time. But listen, you can't get angry about it because when you get angry, you'll start making rash decisions and you'll have bad results. Okay. Second thing to avoid after a wreck where somebody else is blaming you, don't take some low ball, fast cash offer. Here's what happens. Other side flips the script. They say, Hey, it's not our fault. It's your fault. Insurance company says, Hey, you know, but no, we'll give you $1,500. If you'll sign this release, wouldn't you like to have $1,500 right now instead of a long protracted fight? No, you would not listen to this economy. 1,500 bucks is going to go like that. I mean, you get $1,500 in today. Just think about the emergencies you're going to have over the next six weeks. It's going to bleed that $1,500 out. It's going to be gone before you know it. And you're still going to be left with medical bills. You're still going to be left with pain. You're still going to be left with the effects, the long-term effects of this wreck that you were in. And because some insurance adjuster hustled you into taking 1,500 bucks or $2,000, man, you just have to suffer the consequences of that. And it's not worth it. And you don't have to do it. Something else you should avoid after a wreck, especially where somebody else is now blaming you. Don't give a recorded statement. I've said this before. I say this in so many videos. That insurance adjuster is trained on how to ask you questions. That insurance adjuster is trying to get you to say something unwittingly that tanks your case. That's all it's there for. It is not there to make sure they give you an extra $500. It is not there to make sure they give you an extra $10,000, certainly. It is only there. That recorded statement only exists to minimize payouts. Let me tell you something. Do you think that if taking recorded statements resulted in paying more for claims, that the insurance company would make sure they're taking recorded statements? No, sir. Those recorded statements are there to minimize payment of claims. And that's why they pay those adjusters to do those recorded statements. So don't get angry. Don't take some quick lowball settlement offer. And please don't give a recorded statement. You know, sometimes you don't even need video of the wreck when somebody runs a red light and then blames you for the accident. Somebody I know really well, somebody really close to me, was going through a stoplight. She was stopped at the red light. The light turns green. She goes. At fault driver blows through the red light. T-bones her. Car does a 180. And at the scene, there's no video. There's no red light camera. It's a residential area. There's no business right there with a camera on the intersection. But there's a bystander. And the bystander kindly hangs around, checks on this person, hangs around, and then gives the police the true story of what happened. So that the police document it correctly. And they'll always go with a disinterested witness. You know, if there's somebody that doesn't have a dog in the fight, the police are going to go with that person's version of what happened. Not somebody who's worried about his insurance rates going up. If somebody's just walking around and sees a wreck, and that person hangs around and tells the police officer what happened, it's that person's version that's going to be the official version in the crash report. Almost every time. I mean, it's hard to fathom a way in which it wouldn't be the case. So you don't necessarily have to have video. A credible eyewitness can make or break your case. And if you get that, if that person won't hang around, hey, that's fine. Get their cell number. Have them text you. And then on the back end, we can get the information from that person. Even if the police officer working the accident doesn't have an opportunity to talk to her, we can talk to her later. Get a written statement. We can even get a FaceTime video statement if we need to. And then send that to the insurance company to make the claim on your behalf. In that situation, when my friend was in that spot, the eyewitness statement to the police officer made all the difference. And she didn't have to worry about gathering witness statements later. And we were able to prevail on the claim for her because she did, even in a frantic state, did the wise thing up front and had an eyewitness stay and talk to the police when they worked the wreck. If someone else causes a wreck and then seeks to blame you for it, don't stand for that. Call a partial injury lawyer so that we can help you overcome the obstacles they're foolishly placing in front of you. And if you found this video helpful, you need to watch my next video, How to Beat a Lowball Settlement Offer, Five Proven Strategies from a Personal Injury Lawyer. I'll show you how to turn the tables on the insurance company so you don't get shortchanged on any settlement. I'll see you over there.