Help Your Fellow Biker After A Wreck—Witness Identification

Can Witness Information Help?

Being a motorcycle accident attorney, this is something that I see constantly that becomes a big problem in motorcycle wreck cases, and that is police officers seem to almost consistently not put witness information on a police report.

So, you get in a wreck, you’ve got one or more people that saw it, they stop they talk to the police. Time and time again, I get the police report, the client tells me, “oh yeah, there was this lady or that guy stopped, you know, he was in a truck.”

We have no clue who it is, we have nothing to identify that person and we can’t find them. It’s unbelievable, I’ve trained police officers on how to do this, yet they still don’t do it.

How Can I Be Prepared?

Here’s what you guys need to do to help protect each other. If you’re out there riding in a group and one of your fellow bikers goes down and you’re a witness there. Yes, you need to help them first and foremost with any injuries until the police, ambulance, firefighters, etc. arrive.

If there are witnesses and you’re talking to them, get their name, number, and address if you can. You got to protect your fellow bikers, because unlike in cars when you’re in an accident often times you can walk away and you can get this kind of info yourself as the injured party.

When it’s a biker, you’re often times incapacitated, you’re dealing with a broken bone, you’re not consumed with who all saw the accident, who are they, and what’s their information. When we’re there with a fellow biker, get that information for your friend, give it to them and give it to their lawyer.

Let me give you an example, I’ve got a recent case where a truck ran into the rear of a motorcyclist waiting to turn left at a stop sign. At the scene he was conciliatory, he admitted fault, he was so sorry.

It seemed like a very straightforward, rear-end collision, well guess what? We get involved, the insurance companies are involved, and all of a sudden, he changes his story to his own insurance company. They’ve now delayed simply the property damage claim for weeks because they’ve got their insured saying something different that sounds like maybe the motorcyclist might have some comparative negligence.

There are no witnesses on the police report, even though we knew there was one there. We even have a picture of his truck, but we don’t have a license, we don’t have any other kind of identifying information to find this guy who can blow it up and say this is exactly what happened, it was a rear-end collision and this guy’s completely at fault.

Let’s Help Our Fellow Bikers

So, now the insurance company is delaying processing this claim to investigate further. In the end, we’ve got to help our fellow bikers get that information on witnesses for them, so they can worry about their injuries and getting to a hospital.