Like You Never Saw This Coming
The globe-trotting personal injury lawyer/tuberculosis patient who ignored warnings to stay off international flights has, as predicted, been sued.
Montreal lawyer Anlac Nguyen filed the motion in Quebec Superior Court on behalf of seven Canadians and two natives of the Czech Republic. Eight were passengers on the flight with Andrew Speaker and the ninth is a brother and roommate of one of the passengers.
Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injuries attorney, was in Europe when he learned tests showed he had an extremely drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis known as XDR-TB.
Despite warnings from health officials not to board another international flight, Speaker took a Czech Airlines jetliner to Montreal in late May as part of his return trip home. He subsequently became the first American quarantined by the federal government since 1963, and is currently undergoing treatment under isolation in a Denver hospital.
Health officials now say Speaker's strain of TB is not the extremely drug resistant kind but a more treatable, multi-drug-resistant form of the disease.
"They do not have tuberculosis, but nobody can say that they won't have tuberculosis either," Nguyen said of his clients. "And that will not be known, not now, not next year, but for many years in the future, so the pain and suffering that the people have gone through are real. They continue to suffer now because of the uncertainty."
Nassim Tabri sat one row in front of Speaker. Tabri, a 26-year-old Montreal graduate student, found out about his possible exposure when a reporter called him after news of the incident broke last month.
He is seeking $134,900 — the highest amount sought among the nine plaintiffs, mostly for pain, suffering and "loss of opportunities".
"At the very first moment that I found out, I was obviously very stressed, very shocked," said Tabri, who slept through most of the flight. "I'm still very stressed out about it. He deliberately got on this plane, endangered our lives and this is very selfish and reckless behavior that deserves to be punished."
Nguyen said one of the plaintiffs, a 72-year-old man, tested positive for tuberculosis in an initial skin test, but it was unclear if it was related to contact with Speaker.
Tip of the iceberg. There will be many more filed in the near future.
Legal, World news | Gaius Friday, 13 July , 2007
By Ted Goldman, Saturday, 14 July , 2007 @ 9:21 am
How delicious it is!
A callous and indifferent personal injury lawyer (but I repeat myself) being sued for his malicious actions.
It doesn’t get any better than that.