A man who was driving a motorcycle when a passenger vehicle cut him off has recently settled for $2.5 million. Gary Trevena was driving on Dover-Chester Road in Randolph in the summer of 2014 when the accident occurred. Patricia Cammaratta was driving in the opposite direction and turned left in front of Trevena after it was too late for Trevena to avoid hitting Cammaratta, and the vehicles collided head-on. Trevena was thrown onto the car and then onto the pavement, which resulted in shattered vertebrae for Trevena. One of his legs was partially paralyzed, and the other was entirely paralyzed from the spinal injury which ensued. 

A police officer from the Patterson Police Department has been arrested for a fatal hit-and-run of a pedestrian. Jaquill Fields, along with his brother Ameen, were walking near the intersection of North Fourth and Temple streets in Paterson when a car, seeming to come out of nowhere, hit the two brothers and sent them in opposite directions. While Ameen ran over to his brother immediately, he was unable to help. A neighbor called 911 and Jaquill was transported to St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Paterson, where he died of his injuries. Jaquill lived with his girlfriend and two-year-old son. 

A recent fire in Jersey City has led to concerns over building safety and the maintenance of fire escapes. At around 5:20 am on June 15th, a four-story apartment building in Greenville caught fire in one resident’s first-floor kitchen and made its way through the building. A third-floor resident, J.R. Williams, reported that he attempted to escape the building using the fire escape, but using the fire escape was fraught with problems. First, the sliding bolts on the doors to the fire escape had been painted over multiple times, so that each resident attempting to get through had to break down the access door nearest their unit. Second, Williams reported that he fell through the rusted fire escape stairs immediately after stepping onto them and fell one full story down onto the next landing. Another resident reported that each step he took down the escape caused the stair to collapse beneath him. A different resident stated that she knew the fire escape was in poor condition and had complained of the hazard to the landlord a number of times, to no avail. 

In an accident which sent more people to the hospital than any other to occur in the Lincoln Tunnel this year, a New Jersey Transit bus recently rear-ended a chartered bus carrying elementary-aged children. The chartered bus contained a group of 26 Canadian eighth grade students, their principal, and a staff member, traveling into New York City from Toronto for several days of sightseeing. Fortunately, none of the Canadian students were injured. However, 31 of the 60 passengers on the New Jersey Transit bus, headed for the Port Authority Bus Terminal, were sufficiently injured as to require hospitalization. 

James and Evelyn McCarty, both 67, will finally receive compensation for injuries they received after a propane gas explosion in their home in November 2013. The problem initially began in April of 2013 when the couple, homeowners in the Cape May community of Villas, New Jersey, decided to transition from using propane gas to natural gas to heat their home. The McCartys hired Shore Guys Heating and Air Conditioning at the recommendation of South Jersey Fuel & Propane. Although the company installed the natural gas, severed the pipes leading to the propane, and closed the valve on the propane tank, they failed to remove the propane tank from the home’s basement or to lock up the propane tank. 

In June of 2014, actor and comedian Tracy Morgan, along with a number of his associates and friends, was critically injured in a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike between the limousine bus in which Morgan was riding and a Wal-Mart tractor trailer. Morgan, comedian Ardie Fuqua, and Morgan’s assistant Jeffrey Millea, were all hospitalized with critical injuries. Morgan’s friend and mentor, comedian Jimmy McNair, was tragically killed in the crash. The civil lawsuits filed by the three surviving critically-injured passengers and the family of McNair were recently settled, but Morgan reports that he is still recovering from his injuries, which included serious head trauma. The driver of the tractor trailer truck, Kevin Roper, was released on $50,000 bail after the crash. Authorities reported that Roper had been working over 13 hours at the time of the crash, and had not slept for over 24 hours at the time of the accident. 

In a June 2014 decision, the New Jersey Superior Court’s Appellate Division ruled that an employee had been discriminated against when his employer fired him because he was going through a difficult divorce.