AUBURN – A Norway woman failed to convince a jury Wednesday that she was entitled to a $500,000 settlement after a 2004 crash in Auburn that left her with multiple injuries.
A jury in Androscoggin County Superior Court found that there were discrepancies in Shannon White’s accounts of the wintertime crash that left her badly injured and her two young children hurt.
White, 25, was seeking payment for medical costs, lost wages, distress and pain and suffering from the Feb. 4, 2004, crash that left her with broken ankles and internal injuries.
White was suing 29-year-old Timothy Hahn, a Lewiston man and the driver of an Auburn plow truck that collided with White’s car on Young’s Corner Road.
White also sued the driver of a second vehicle that rear-ended her car after the collision with the plow truck. Her case against John P. Carroll, 53, of Norway, was settled last week. Details of the settlement were not disclosed.
In her suit against Hahn, White argued that he was driving the truck across the center line when she crashed into a tire on the rig.
But Edward R. Benjamin, the lawyer representing Hahn and the city of Auburn, told the jury that in earlier accounts of the wreck, White told police, physicians and an insurance investigator that she had slid across the road into the truck.
“At the hospital, she told a police officer that all she remembered was sliding on ice and seeing a big truck coming at her,” Benjamin said.
Nine days later, White told the same story to a doctor. Two weeks after the crash, she repeated that version of the wreck to an insurance investigator, Benjamin said.
The lawyer, from the firm Thompson and Bowie in Portland, convinced the jury that White changed her story only after a man claiming to be a witness called her at the hospital to say the crash was not her fault.
“She ended up basically parroting his version of events,” Benjamin said.
The lawyer successfully argued that the man, who lives on Young’s Corner Road, would not have been able to witness the collision from his yard.
“Our argument was that he was not in a position to see much of anything,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin was further aided in his defense of Hahn when Carroll testified that he was driving behind White and that he saw her Saturn slide into the oncoming lane just before the crash.
The jury deliberated for three hours before ruling, 7-2, Wednesday afternoon in favor of Hahn.
White underwent several surgeries after the crash. She suffered two broken ankles and a sliced liver, lost part of her spleen, and ultimately had steel rods set in one of her legs. Her latest surgery was this past May.
Riding in the back seat of White’s car when it crashed, her 5-year-old son was airlifted to Maine Medical Center in Portland with a concussion. He was released from the hospital a day later. White’s 2-year-old son was examined for pain after the collision.
White could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.
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