The families of two 11-year-old Mississippi girls have filed a lawsuit over alleged design defects with the Yamaha Rhino, claiming that the side-by-side vehicle is inherently unstable and caused an ATV rollover accident that claimed the lives of both girls. The Yamaha Rhino wrongful death suit joins hundreds of other similar claims alleging severe and sometimes fatal injuries were caused when the ATV tipped over, often at slow speeds on relatively flat surfaces.
The parents of Emily Ann Bates and Lauren Elizabeth Dilworth filed the complaint last Wednesday in Gwinnett County, Georgia, the location of the home offices of Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corp. of America. The wrongful death lawsuit says the two girls died on October 18, 2008 in DeSoto County, Mississippi when their Rhino flipped over while being operated at low speed.
According to the complaint, the 1,000 pound vehicle rolled over onto the two six graders, killing Dilworth instantly and pinning Bates, causing severe trauma to her head. Bates was rushed to Baptist-DeSoto Hospital in Southaven, where she was pronounced dead.
The lawsuit is the most recent of several hundred Yamaha Rhino lawsuits that have been filed throughout the United States. The lawsuits all have similar allegations that the design problems with the Yamaha Rhino make the vehicle prone to rollover, sometimes at speeds as slow as 13 miles per hour on flat pavement.
All federal Yamaha Rhino cases have been centralized for pretrial proceedings as part of an MDL, or multidistrict litigation, before Judge Jennifer B. Coffman in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. The first Yamaha Rhino trials in the MDL, which are known as “bellwether” cases because they are used to gauge how jurors will respond to evidence that will be presented throughout the litigation, are scheduled to begin in October 2010.
The latest lawsuit says that the Yamaha Rhino was defectively designed, leading to an unstable vehicle in which some of the safety measures, such as the roll cage, are more likely to cause severe injury than prevent it. The lawsuit alleges that there have been at least 59 Yamaha Rhino deaths.
Yamaha officials point out that the vehicles’ safety recommendations call for drivers to be at least 16-years-old and licensed. They also recommend wearing a helmet and seat belt.
Last August, a Texas state court jury found that Yamaha was not liable for the wrongful death of a 13 year-old boy in a Yamaha Rhino accident suit filed by his parents. In that case, the jury decision was based on the individual circumstances of that accident, including the fact that the teenage boy was driving a Rhino that had been modified and his father testified that he was not wearing a helmet when the vehicle flipped and crushed him.