Accident victim still waiting for state to pay claim

 23 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star

SCHUYLER — Jake Wagner was 16 when he drove through the main intersection in Schuyler nine years ago on a Sunday evening — Valentine’s Day.

He has no memory of it, though, because as he and three friends headed south on that warm, clear night, to Glorimar’s café, a semitrailer truck slammed into the Buick Sentry he was driving, pushing it more than half a block west, leaving him with a critical head injury.

Witnesses said the traffic signal had malfunctioned, giving green lights to both Wagner and the driver of the semi, owned by Metz Baking Co. They said many people had called in complaints about the light malfunctioning for months before the crash.

[+]Enlarge

Gail Fickle and her son, Jake Wagner, at Nebraska 15 and 16th Street (U.S. 30) in Schuyler, where Jake was injured in a collision with a semi when traffic signals turned green in all directions on Feb. 14, 1999. (Gwyneth Roberts)

Gail Fickle and her son, Jake Wagner, at Nebraska 15 and 16th Street (U.S. 30) in Schuyler, where Jake was injured in a collision with a semi when traffic signals turned green in all directions on Feb. 14, 1999. (Gwyneth Roberts)

The state has denied claims filed by Wagner’s Lincoln attorney, Doug Peterson, for years, but last year the state Supreme Court ordered the state to pay Wagner $9.9 million, nearly triple what had originally been ordered by a Colfax County District Court.

The award was among the largest publicly announced awards in the state. Some settled amounts are not disclosed because of confidentially agreements, but it was the largest ever against the state Department of Roads.

Wagner, now 25, still hasn’t seen the money. The Legislature must first approve the claim, which was heard Monday by the Business and Labor Committee. It has not yet acted to send the claim to the full Legislature.

Wagner’s mother, Gail Fickle, said people in Schuyler continue to tell her the light is still malfunctioning.

Mary Jo Hall, spokeswoman for the Department of Roads, said the Schuyler signal lights have become somewhat of a community legend, that the department’s research shows the lights work—they always have.

Fickle begs to differ.

n n n

The telephone rang shortly after 10 p.m. that night at the Fickle home. Gail and her husband had just returned from a Valentine dinner in Columbus and he reached for the phone.

“I said, ‘That’s Jake. Tell him no. He has to get home,’” she said.

But the caller wasn’t Jake. It was the call no parent ever wants to get — someone telling a mother to come immediately to the hospital.

They arrived minutes before he did, then heard the whoosh of the emergency room doors as the gurney pushed through and Fickle saw her son, lying so still, his arm flopping over the side.

“He looked like he was gone,” she said. “I said ‘Oh, dear God,’ and slid down the wall.”

A helicopter picked him up a few minutes later to take him to an Omaha hospital. His mother was unsure if he would make it there alive. He did, and he lived to the next morning, and another day and another.

He was semiconscious several months, then spent many more months in a rehabilitation hospital. Eventually, he was moved to another rehabilitation facility in Sheldon, Iowa, where he stayed for six years, his care paid for by Medicaid.

But last August, he was sent home, and his mother was told she needed to find a place in Nebraska to care for Jake. The family tried several nursing homes, but they weren’t the right fit for a 25-year-old who could get around in a wheelchair and needed the company of others his age as much as he needed daily care.

He’s been at home for more than a month. His mom takes care of him, but must work, too, and arrange for people to come and check on him hourly. He’s 6 feet tall and weighs over 185 pounds, and it’s difficult to help move him around. She’s fallen with him at least once.

Wagner still has trouble with speech, balance, feeding himself. He has only some use of his left arm and no use of the right.

He loves the outdoors, used to go fishing, hunting, trapping, skiing. Now he goes out in his wheelchair when the weather is nice. And he rides along when his stepdad goes hunting and trapping. Otherwise, his entertainment is the television.

“It’s not the best setup in the world, but we make do with what we can,” his mother said. “He needs to be somewhere that has activities for a young person. … Hopefully, this money should be a tremendous help to make his quality of life better.”

n n n

Fickle said she’s still concerned about the lights where Nebraska 15 intersects with 16th Street, which is also U.S. 30, in the middle of town.

Even though the state maintained conflicting green lights could not occur, attorney Peterson found witnesses who said they had seen it. And one man who had been sitting in the convenience store on the northeast corner of the intersection testified he saw the green lights at the time of the crash.

Dan Waddle, state traffic engineer, said every time the state has responded to a complaint, no problem was observed. The signals also test correctly.

The signals at the Schuyler intersection were changed a few years ago as part of a scheduled replacement and upgrade, Waddle said.

If the signal’s conflict monitor picks up a potential problem, he said, the lights go immediately into flashing red mode, or flashing red in one direction and flashing yellow in the other.

Conflict monitors are tested annually, he said.

Some people have questioned whether the state has a good process for handling traffic light complaints, since many complaints were said to have been reported before the accident.

Waddle said the state has a system for documenting complaints that come in to district sites and maintenance yards. And roads employees keep track of work done on traffic signal boxes by marking the inside of cabinet doors.

The state has plans to create an 800 number for traffic signal complaints. He wasn’t specific about when the number would be operational.

“It should be soon,” he said.

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.