Paul Walker: Porsche Blames Late Actor For His 2013 Death
Paul Walker, the late actor that starred in the Fast and Furious franchise, died in a fiery car crash in November, 2013. In September, his daughter, Meadow Walker, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the car’s maker, Porsche, claiming they were responsible for his death.
Paul Walker’s daughter, Meadow Rain, filed the original wrongful death suit against Porsche in Los Angeles County Superior Court in September, claiming the company failed to install an electronic stability control system in its Carrera GT, despite knowing the car had a history of control issues.
Also, the suit claims the company was responsible for the defective seat belt system which anchored its seat belt shoulder straps to the rear engine compartment of the car. According to Meadow’s lawsuit, the seat belt “snapped Walker’s torso back with thousands of pounds of force,” which resulted in Walker breaking his clavicle, ribs, and pelvis. The way the seat belt was constructed caused it to “trap” Walker in a position where he “remained alive until the vehicle erupted into flames one minute and twenty seconds later.”
Porsche says Paul Walker, not the Carrera GT, at fault for his fatal accident. https://t.co/8qb6LA7skO pic.twitter.com/wPGTrG5QhW
— Road & Track (@RoadandTrack) November 17, 2015
The fire was caused, according to Meadow Walker’s suit, by another one of the car’s defects, which were the “rubber fuel lines that lacked break-free fittings to automatically shut down the fuel flow.” This resulted in Walker breathing “soot into his trachea while the Porsche Carrera GT burned.”
Meadow’s suit came nearly two years after the November 30 crash that killed her father and his friend, Roger Rodas, who was driving the car, outside a charity event in Santa Clarita, California.
Now, the car company has responded to Meadow’s lawsuit, claiming the actor was the one responsible for his own death. According to the papers the German sports car company filed in Los Angeles last week, Walker “knowingly and voluntarily assumed all risk” when he decided to get inside the Carrera GT.
Porsche SLAM Paul Walker’s daughter’s lawsuit, which blames the car for actor’s death: https://t.co/oDCV3q86KU pic.twitter.com/0VCpiSDnfw
— heat & heatworld.com (@heatworld) November 17, 2015
“He [Paul Walker] chose to conduct himself in a manner so as to expose himself to such perils, dangers and risks, thus assuming all the risks involved in using the vehicle,” the papers, obtained by the New York Daily News, read. “The subject 2005 Carrera GT was abused and altered after having been placed into the stream of commerce in a manner that was not reasonably forseeable to (Porsche),” the paperwork continued.
Porsche previously issued a similar statement to Roger Rodas’ wife, Kristine Rodas, in response to her own lawsuit she filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in May, 2014. According to her lawsuit, the “suspension failure of the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT led to her husband losing control of the vehicle before it careened into trees and a utility pole.”
Roger Rodas’s death, and all other injuries or damages claimed, “were the result of Roger Rodas’s own comparative fault,” the company said, according to a previous report by Hometown Station. “Roger Rodas knowingly and voluntarily assumed all risk, perils, and danger in respect to the operation or use of the subject 2005 Carrera GT, that the perils, risk and dangers were open and obvious and known to him, and that he chose to conduct himself in a manner so as to expose himself and others to such perils, dangers and risks, thus assuming all the risks involved in using and operating the vehicle.”
Do you think Porsche should be held responsible for Paul Walker’s and Roger Roda’s 2013 deaths? Leave your comments below.
[Photo by Andrew Medichini / Associated Press]
