Fulton v. Seegebarth
Fulton v. Seegebarth
Opinion of the Court
This is an action brought by the respondents, Fulton, against the appellants, Seegebarth, to recover for personal injuries and for damages to their passenger automobile, resulting from a collision between their automobile and an automobile truck owned and operated by the appellants. The cause was tried by the court sitting without a jury, and resulted in a judgment in favor of the respondents in the sum of $1,942.
The collision occurred at a road intersection. The respondents were driving their automobile southerly on the paved part of the Pacific highway. The appellants were driving their truck westerly on an unpaved, although graveled, road crossing the highway at practically a right angle. The respondents’ testimony tended to show that, as they approached the crossing, they gradually slowed the speed of their car down from some thirty miles an hour to less than fifteen miles an hour, and were moving at less than the latter rate of speed when they entered the intersection of the highways; that they were on what was to them the right-hand side of the pavement, near the center of the intersection, when the appellants drove their truck upon the highway from their left, over and across the highway, striking their car on its left side at the rear door, crushing the door and the fender of the car and causing the car to overturn.
The appellants’ testimony, on the contrary, tended to show that they approached the crossing driving at a speed of about ten miles an hour, and that, as they reached the intersection, they slowed down to a lesser rate of speed; that, as they reached the intersection, they had an unobstructed view to the north for a distance of several hundred feet and saw no one approaching within that distance; that they then drove
It is, of course, at once apparent that both of these discordant statements as to the cause and manner of the accident cannot be true. One is necessarily false, and neither is necesssarily true. To discover wherein the truth lies we have examined the record with care, but find little aid therein. The physical situation, the surroundings, or even the probabilities seem not to belie either party, and the witnesses, having no financial interest in the case, and who were practically even in number on each side, seem, when judged by the printed record, to have been even more partisan than were the' principals themselves. In such a condition, discussion is useless. The trial judge, who had the witnesses before him, could, with much more certainty than can we, arrive at a correct result with regard to the facts, and we feel on this question constrained to abide by the result reached by him.
The judgment appealed from is affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.