What to Do After a Car Accident in Oklahoma
You’re driving along minding your own business and suddenly you’re in a wreck with another vehicle, with another driver. There are people who observed this. They were standing in the parking lot, they were standing on the street, they were in a place where they could see what happened. What do you do? It’s so important to know what to do that we actually have a checklist. My name is Tulsa lawyer Michael S. Ashworth. One of the things that you do is call us, but here’s the checklist that you should keep for yourself. Put it in your glove box, keep it there, that if you’re ever in an accident do these things. Do not miss any of them.
Stay at the Scene and Call for Help
Number one on our list that we use is stay at the scene. Do not leave the scene. Don’t try to leave the scene. Don’t make it look like you may be leaving the scene. Leaving the scene of an accident, property damage, or personal injury is a crime. If the other person attempts to leave the scene, then they are eligible or could be prosecuted for a crime. Next thing you do as soon as you’ve been in the accident and stay at the scene, call for help. Call 911. Don’t call your spouse, don’t call a friend. Call 911 immediately. They’re going to ask you a series of questions. One of the questions would be, is anybody injured? And the standard response is, I don’t know. Because as many of you know who have been in an accident or if you played sports, things like that, when the body sustains trauma, it doesn’t always wake up and notice it until a day or two later. So call for help, 911.
Gather Information and Report the Accident to the Police
Gather information. In other words, get the information from the other driver, insurance, driver’s license, things like that, their names. Try to get the names of any of the watchers, anybody who’s oversaw or happened to see the accident or even heard the accident. Sometimes what people hear is more important than what they see. We call that an ear witness. They may not have seen the actual cars fly, but they heard the sound of brakes or horns or they could hear the crashing of metal, but they didn’t see it. But they’re still potentially very important witnesses. Report the accident to the police officers when they get there. Normally what they’ll do is, they’ll drive, they’ll talk to one driver separately from the other driver. Be factual. Tell them everything you know and recollect. And if they ask you again if you’re injured, say, I don’t know, because you don’t know that yet. If you do hurt somewhere, be able to detail for them, my neck’s hurting, my back’s hurting, I hit my knee, I hit my head, things of that type. It’s very, very important that you do that. The next is to seek medical attention. Now this is one that gets a lot of folks in trouble. I’ve got a case right now with a girl. She’s a student in Tahlequah College and she was in an accident. And she, you know, was a little dizzy for a while and all that. And we were talking on the phone about the case and about our representation, our potential representation. And when she was describing how she was feeling to me a week after the accident, I said, I want you to go see a doctor right now. And she said, oh I’ll be okay. I said, no, go see a doctor right now. Sure enough, when she went to the doctor, guess what they found? The accident had caused a concussion, a closed head injury. Now she’s going in for magnetic resonance imaging, an MRI, because her injuries are more severe than she knew or wanted to admit. People have a tendency to minimize things like that. Oh, I don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s a waste of time. It’s, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Call Us Today!
When you’re in an accident in today’s world with today’s medical skills and technology, go get checked out. The next thing you do after all those on your checklist is call us. Call me, Oklahoma car accident attorney Michael S. Ashworth at TulsaPersonalInjuryLawyer.pro so we can help you walk you through this process.
