Steering the way Transportation attorney offers wise counsel to bussing clients
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By Tom Kirvan
t’s a call no one wants to receive.
Word was relayed that a 6-year-old boy was dead, his life cut short after being hit by a school bus while he gave chase into the street for a ball that got loose in his front yard. By the time New York attorney Tom Dargan was summoned to the scene on Long Island, the school bus driver was in handcuffs as police investigators tried to determine how the tragedy unfolded on what should have been just another care-free day for the young boy. As it was, Dargan was immediately witness to a cordoned off street engulfed in grief, trauma, and confusion as he tried to make sense of it all from a legal perspective.
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Dargan, after all, had a job to do – to best represent the interests of his client, the bus company that suddenly had become front and center in a story laden with tragic consequences.
“By all accounts, it became pretty clear that the bus driver was not at fault, that he was driving slowly and not recklessly when the accident occurred,” Dargan said in recounting a case emblazoned in his memory. “But that didn’t erase what had just happened. A little boy was killed. His parents were suddenly without their son. And the bus driver was traumatized about his part in all of it.” As the father of two children, Dargan knew he had to remain emotionally detached from what was swirling around him.
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“It’s hard to imagine the grief the family was experiencing,” said Dargan, currently the co-managing partner of Lewis Johs Avallone Aviles, LLP, an insurance defense firm based on Long Island. “In a situation like that, there are no winners. Everyone suffered some form of loss that day, some obviously to a greater degree than others. It was my job to express a profound sense of empathy over what happened and to help determine our client’s extent of responsibility.” Given the circumstances of a little boy’s death, Dargan advised executives at the bus company to promptly pay death benefits to the family and to cover all funeral expenses as a show of good faith. “I actually showed up at the funeral home with a check in hand, which I think went