A. Most paralysis not caused by a stoke is caused by a spinal cord injury. Almost all quadriplegic cases are the result of a spinal cord injury. Some are caused by strokes, bleeds in the brain or other catastrophic spinal cord and brain injury. Brain injuries may be caused by oxygen deprivation, which can lead to paralysis or quadriplegia.

Q. What is a spinal cord injury (SCI)?

A. The spinal cord is a bundle of nerves that conduct information from the brain to the rest of the body, and from the body back to the brain. Some nerves are related to sensation and/or motor function, maintaining involuntary bodily functions such as breathing. This bundle of nerves is encased in the bony spinal column. If the spine is broken, the spinal cord suffers a traumatic injury which can result in loss of function and feeling.

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Have you been injured in Lynnwood, WA? If so, you may be entitled to financial compensation. Contact a Lynnwood Injury Lawyer at our firm today to learn more, free of charge.

Pierce County prosecutors say Speed, 61, took a beating last year from Dennis Geyer, an angry neurosurgeon who didn’t appreciate being cut off on Highway 16.

Geyer, 38, is charged with second-degree assault with a deadly weapon enhancement. He is pleading not guilty.

The weapon in question was Speed’s Thermos, a well-used hunk of green metal, glass and plastic.

Prosecutors say Geyer followed Speed over the Narrows Bridge, confronted him at a Gig Harbor-area intersection, dragged Speed out of his car, slugged him, grabbed his Thermos and smashed it into the side of Speed’s face before driving away.

Opening arguments started Tuesday. They were short. Deputy prosecutor Diane Clarkson summarized the circumstances and the charge. Wayne Fricke, Geyer’s attorney, took his turn and offered a two-pronged argument: self-defense and weak evidence.

Geyer didn’t intend to hit Speed, Fricke said; he punched the older man because he was afraid of being kicked.

The Thermos allegation held no water, he argued. The victim couldn’t remember being hit with it and Geyer didn’t touch it, Fricke said. Forensic tests were inconclusive, and the only witness who claimed to see the blow had a shaky memory.

The witness, Leslie Perry, was the first to testify. Clarkson walked her through memories of March 2, 2009. Perry, running an errand, stopped at East Bay Drive Northwest and Wollochet Drive Northwest shortly before sunset.

She noticed something in the rearview mirror: a younger bald man on foot, pounding on the window of the van behind her.

In court, Perry couldn’t identify Geyer, but she remembered what she saw. The man was arguing with someone in the van, and then the van door opened.

“Could you tell who opened the door?” Clarkson asked.

“My best recollection was the man from outside opened the door,” Perry said. “The man from the outside reached in and grabbed the older gentleman and pulled him out. It appeared that he was extremely angry. The man on the inside was kicking to try to keep him away.”

“Did he punch him once?”

“No – multiple times,” Perry said.

The older man didn’t hit back. Perry remembered shouting at the bald man to stop and seeing the older man fall.

She saw the older man starting to get up. The bald man walked away, then stopped at the van and pulled something out of it – “something long, like a cylinder-type thing,” Perry said.

“What did you see him do with that object?” Clarkson asked.

Perry’s voice quavered.

“When the older gentleman got up, he hit the man so hard that he spun around, and I was screaming, ‘No, no, no.’”

On cross-examination, Fricke shot holes in Perry’s account. Hadn’t she seen Mr. Speed’s arms “flailing around” inside the car before the fight? Hadn’t she seen Speed pounding on the window? Hadn’t Speed opened the door, and not Dr. Geyer?

Perry didn’t think so. Fricke showed her passages from her deposition, given in October, and her statement to police, written the day of the incident. She admitted some details were different, but she had been hurried and nervous that day.

The victim was next. Speed, dressed in a suit and tie, spoke quietly and carefully. On the day in question, he had driven home from Seattle, eased his van onto Highway 16 westbound, and changed lanes. He heard a horn behind him.

“I saw an individual in a small car come up beside me, obviously upset,” he said. The man in the little car was waving at him with both hands, telling Speed to pull over. The two vehicles were near Fircrest, he recalled.

Did he see the man in the courtroom? He did. It was Geyer.

Speed remembered the back-and-forth as the two men rolled down the highway.

“I assumed I had probably cut him off or did something he didn’t like, so I turned and mouthed, ‘I’m sorry,’” he said.

Geyer wasn’t satisfied, Speed recalled. He kept waving.

“I just proceeded to ignore him,” Speed said. “I was not going to pull over.”

Geyer followed him over the bridge, Speed said, followed him to the intersection of East Bay Drive and Wollochet. Speed stopped, heard a car door open and close behind him, and footsteps. Geyer was at his driver’s window, yelling, “Open the door,” he said.

Speed looked down at the latch and realized his door was unlocked. Geyer saw the same thing.

“He immediately opened the door and hit me in the face with his fist,” Speed said.

Speed said he was close to blacking out. He remembered reaching for the only available weapon: the trusty Thermos his wife had given him 10 years earlier.

“I picked it up and I was gonna swing it at him,” Speed recalled. “In my mind I was gonna throw it as hard as I could, swing it as hard as I could. In actuality, my arm had almost no strength, it was almost like in slow motion. (Geyer) looked at the Thermos, saw it was coming at him and basically just took it away from me.”

Speed remembered Geyer pulling him out of the car. He’d kicked at him then, he recalled – all he could do. The rest was a blur. He was on the ground, and his face hurt, and then the hospital, and pain and medication. He started to say he’d been diagnosed with a detached retina. Fricke objected to that testimony, then took on the cross-examination.

And Speed had a cell phone, but didn’t call 911? Why not? Speed said it didn’t occur to him that he should until it was too late.

“I have a pretty clear memory up to the point where I don’t remember anything,” he said.

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As a result, the number of felons reported to be living in the facilities increased last month, according to state records and interviews. Illinois nursing homes disclosed that they held 3,326 offenders as of Dec. 10, up from 3,224 on Nov. 5.

Some had been living in the facilities undeclared for as long as a year, records show.

“If they have not been reporting individuals in the past, they’ve begun reporting them,” said Richard Dees, chief of the state Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Long-Term Care.

Statewide, the rate at which facilities reported new felons has doubled from about 50 a month to 100 last month.

Since 2006, Illinois has required nursing facilities to conduct criminal background checks on all new residents and immediately notify state health authorities when they admit anyone with a serious felony conviction. But some homes failed to conduct the background checks within the required time period, made serious errors on the checks, or simply failed to report felons to public health officials, the Tribune found in an October investigation. Some of these offenders went on to commit assaults and other serious crimes inside the homes.

On Friday, for example, a 22-year-old mentally ill felon pleaded guilty to the brutal January rape of a 69-year-old woman who lived in the same Elgin nursing home. Christopher Shelton’s background screening had been improperly handled by Elgin’s Maplewood Care nursing home because they used the wrong birth date, records show. Shelton will serve 12 years under his plea agreement.

The surprising number of offenders in Illinois nursing facilities stems from a decades-old policy that shuttered state-run psychiatric hospitals while offering little housing and community-based treatment to the discharged patients. Many, including thousands with criminal records, wound up in nursing homes that were ill-equipped to monitor and treat them, according to government reports and interviews with officials and advocates.

The felons currently housed in Illinois nursing facilities include 196 sex offenders, state records show.

The largest jump in reported felons occurred at Wincrest Nursing Center, a 70-bed facility nestled amid student dormitories near the Loyola University Chicago campus in Edgewater. The number of felons reportedly living at Wincrest more than doubled to 30 in December from 12 the previous month, state records show.

Facility administrator Narad Persadsingh acknowledged that his staff knew about the criminal backgrounds of the 18 newly disclosed felons but simply failed to notify the state as required by law. “I just missed it,” Persadsingh said.

He said state health authorities are not taking punitive action because the facility is now in compliance with state law. Federal health care inspectors recently gave Wincrest a four-out-of-five-star, “above average” rating for overall quality.

State Rep. Harry Osterman, whose district encompasses the facility, said he repeatedly has asked Wincrest how many felons live there but “to date they have not given that to us.” Told the number by reporters, Osterman said: “I’m astonished. That highlights the public safety concerns that we’ve seen in the past.”

Neighbors’ complaints to Osterman’s office have included accusations that Wincrest residents have purchased drugs, committed burglaries and harassed students. An April 2009 state health department report said Wincrest residents “purchase and smoke marijuana and consume alcohol while off the premises of the facility,” and added that one resident allegedly had walked into a nearby dorm and smeared feces on the walls. There are seven Loyola residence halls with about 600 students within a block of Wincrest, and female students have reported catcalls and harassment, university officials said.

Persadsingh told the Tribune that, by law, Wincrest can put few restrictions on its residents, who suffer from psychiatric and substance abuse problems. “These are mentally ill people and we don’t lock them in like animals,” he said. He added that neighborhood complaints are exaggerated and stem from Loyola’s desire to take over the property. “They want this place,” Persadsingh said. “They want to gentrify the area.”

Loyola officials said they are not against having a psychiatric facility in their midst, but they question whether Wincrest is properly treating and supervising its residents. “I wouldn’t want my daughter to walk by there at 12 at night,” said Loyola Interim Director of Campus Safety Robert Fine.

The state health department’s Division of Patient Safety and Quality has only two employees dedicated solely to collecting reports of felons, tracking the offenders and initiating the state’s risk assessments, which are used to identify high-risk individuals who should live in private rooms and be closely monitored.

“We are short-staffed,” state health department spokeswoman Melaney Arnold said.

Gov. Pat Quinn’s new Nursing Home Safety Task Force, formed in response to Tribune reports, is considering ways to strengthen and speed the background checks and risk assessments as part of a broader overhaul designed to protect vulnerable residents and improve the care of the mentally ill.

“We’re glad that the spotlight that is being directed toward this issue is contributing to a serious effort on the part of the nursing home providers and the department to follow our existing rules that will better help us segregate people who need a different sort of setting for their care,” task force chairman Michael Gelder said in an interview.

An increase in felons also was reported at Sharon Healthcare Pines in Peoria, which disclosed 18 offenders this month, up from 11 in November.

While one of those seven newly reported felons was admitted to Sharon Pines in recent weeks, the criminal backgrounds of the other six had been known to the facility for months — but not disclosed to health authorities as required, records and interviews show.

Among them was a 45-year-old convicted burglar and drug user with a major psychiatric disorder. A second, a 49-year-old with numerous convictions and a mood disorder, had been living in the home unreported for almost a year, according to his confidential state risk assessment report.

It was “an unfortunate clerical error,” said Arnold Kanter, a facility spokesman. “What is more significant than the number of felons is the monitoring and treatment they receive,” he added.

Federal health care inspectors recently gave a five-star, “well above average” rating for overall quality to Sharon Pines, which specializes in younger adults with psychiatric illness and severe medical conditions. There have been 11 police reports of alleged violence at the facility since January 2008.

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The accident occurred just before 3 a.m. near the intersection of Washington Avenue and Short Street, according to New Orleans Police Department spokeswoman Officer Shereese Harper.

Emergency medical technicians were summoned to the scene, where the man was pronounced dead. Police are investigating whether alcohol was a factor in the crash.

His name is being withheld pending notification of family members, Harper said.

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The accident happened about 1:30 p.m. Thursday at 15th and I in northwest Washington. There were fifteen people on the bus at the time.

Metro said it did not have any information about the driver of either vehicle.

If you have been injured or perhaps someone close to you has been injured in a Washington truck accident you should be financially compensated. However, this is ALWAYS easier said then done. You are welcome to contact our office of experienced WA trial attorneys for a free initial consultation at a time and place of your convenience.

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If a Washington accident results in an injury to you―whether physical or mental―you might be entitled to more compensation than the payout by the at-fault party’s insurance company. In fact, unless you specialize in tort law, you might not realize either how difficult your injury might make things for you―or the extent of your right to be paid for your trouble.

An experienced Washington Personal Injury lawyer will make it much simpler for you to get money in your pocket and fully compensated for your Washington personal injuries.

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