$500,000 Settlement for Taxi Passenger With Broken Femurs and Brain Injury After Hit-and-Run Cab
Won by Auger & Auger.
Margaret Linville, 58, suffered bilateral distal femur fractures, fractured ribs, and a traumatic brain injury when her Charlotte taxi struck a telephone pole after another cab cut it off and fled the scene; dashcam footage identified the fleeing driver, and the case settled for $500,000.
What happened
On a September 2015 evening in Charlotte, Margaret Linville, a 58-year-old visitor from New Mexico, was a passenger in a taxi when a second cab made a sudden maneuver that forced her driver to swerve. The taxi struck a telephone pole. The driver of the second cab left the scene without stopping.
Linville's injuries were severe. She sustained comminuted fractures of both distal femurs, fractured ribs, and a traumatic brain injury that included a temporal lobe hemorrhage. The combination of orthopedic trauma and a brain bleed placed her among the most seriously injured survivors in Charlotte taxi cases of that period.
Attorneys Hunter Gillespie and Herbert Auger of Auger and Auger took the case and faced an immediate challenge: identifying the fleeing driver. Gillespie obtained dashcam footage from the second taxi, which showed the cab failing to yield the right-of-way and then accelerating away from the scene. The recording established both fault and flight.
The footage pointed investigators to Rachid Oufquir and his company, Taxi USA LLC. Two other defendants, driver Habtom Tesfaye and his company City Cab, LLC, were named initially but dismissed after the investigation confirmed they bore no liability for the collision.
With liability resolved through the dashcam evidence, the parties reached a settlement on January 17, 2018. Oufquir and Taxi USA LLC paid $500,000 to resolve Linville's claims in Mecklenburg County Superior Court (Case 17-CVS-8253).
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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