Outcry prompts insurer to agree to pay crash victim’s bills

EVERETT – Ethel Adams was traveling down Aurora Avenue to deliver dentures for a client when she was severely injured in a six-car pileup last March.

The impact crushed Adams’ car and left her in a coma for nine days with crushed bones and a collapsed lung. The 60-year-old deliverywoman was told she might never walk normally again and has been in a wheelchair ever since.

Then she learned her insurance company, a subsidiary of Farmers Insurance Group, was contending her injuries were caused by the intentional act of the driver who precipitated the collision – not by an accident – and thus the company felt no obligation to pay her more than $500,000 in hospital bills.

Her lawyer, Paul L. Stritmatter of Hoquiam, responded with a lawsuit.

“What was this if it wasn’t an accident?” Adams asked. “This is everybody’s worst nightmare. You know you have insurance – you’ve paid for it – and you’ve got these massive injuries. Then to be told, ‘No, you don’t have coverage,’ it was like someone punched me in the stomach. It makes you physically ill.”

The case, which was first reported by The Seattle Times and KING-TV, prompted a flood of outraged e-mail and phone calls that swamped officials and lawmakers, from state Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler to executives at Farmers headquarters in Los Angeles.

Some vowed to cancel their policies. Others said they would boycott the insurance giant, which covers 566,000 cars, 274,000 homes and 17,000 small businesses in Washington state alone.

Kreidler characterized Farmers’ denial as “an imaginative interpretation” of state law and ordered the company to pay up by 5 p.m. Thursday or face legal action.

In a statement issued late Wednesday, Farmers spokeswoman Mary Flynn said, “Coverage is available for the losses incurred by Ethel Adams, a motorist injured in an intentional road rage incident earlier this year.”

Flynn said Farmers never denied coverage but believed that under state case law, someone involved in an accident must be found negligent before coverage is triggered.

The crash was not an accident, she asserted, because it was caused by Michael Testa, 39, who has pleaded guilty to vehicular assault and faces sentencing Nov. 10.

Testa intentionally rammed his girlfriend’s pickup truck, which crossed the centerline and collided with Adams’ Hyundai.

Stritmatter disputed Flynn’s characterization.

“I think I’ve counted five different times where the company has said, ‘We’re denying you coverage,’ ” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I battle with insurance companies all the time, but I’ve never had a case where they tried to claim it’s not an accident. Even that’s a new one for me.”