Advice needed-small car accident

anyway, I’m in Pittsburgh for work and I have been for a few weeks. it’s been a pretty exhausting job, but my wife calls from Louisiana last night and she ended up in a small car accident. She says she was turning left on a yellow, that may have been red and a car impacted her and I’m assuming the car’s light was green and my wife is potentially at fault although she insists it was yellow.

they reached out to law-enforcement however after about an hour, the person that she struck wanted to leave. She said they mentioned some concern about their license, maybe being expired.

they exchanged insurance information and by the time I saw the text from my wife I woke up, groggy and pretty exhausted and talk to her about this. My advice to her being that I would’ve waited for law-enforcement regardless.


it is probably an issue everywhere but here in Louisiana people are sue happy over bullshit.

as mentioned, the likelihood is that the light may have been yellow, but she was too slow and making the left turn and maybe the car had a green light but was going a little bit fast. Not so much worried about if it’s her fault or not but I would seek any advice on what to do now to try to protect us from them suing unnecessarily. I’m not worried about insurance covering damages to their vehicle, but I don’t want them claiming any medical bullshit. Everybody was fine at both sites and left rather amicably, but we also don’t know these people

any thoughts y’all have may be appreciated?.

 

Hello my friend,

so this is kind of I guess where my question is. She did not. they called the police and my wife knows that this is a standard procedure but after about an hour, the other driver got jumpy and wanted to leave, he told my wife something about his license status.

to be honest, I believe this was probably a bit of my wife’s doing. If you’re turning left across traffic on a yellow light, you really need to make sure that you’re not doing it slowly. But knowing my wife, I can see her kind of slowly making the turn across the other traffic lane.

so in a way, I imagine the oncoming vehicle would’ve seen her coming at some point when their light was red, but I imagine that she was in the intersection of their lane at some point when it was green.

ideally in my opinion, I told my wife that she should’ve just waited there even if the other driver left but instead she was a little bit rattled and headed home. This was not like a high speed impact and yes, it’s been reported to both insurance carriers.

Louisiana is just the absolute worst as far as people trying to take advantage of these situations, for context, I rear-ended a lady that went into a dead stop on a feeder for no reason and I still had to deal with her attempting to sue me. There was some sort of legal maneuver pulled by the insurance company, and it ended up being offloaded to her suing my employer.

so essentially, I am not sure if my wife should even follow up with the police or maybe in a way not having a police report falls in my favor. My wife’s impression of the folks was that they were amicable to just exchange information on the insurance, but I have never been in an accident where I didn’t wait for a police report so I am not really sure what to do?

and being out of state and having a pretty long couple work weeks I definitely lacked any empathy for my wife last because she knows to wait for the police. Subsequently I have apologize for that, but I am still trying to figure out the next step. For all I know maybe the lack of police report is actually good. I have no idea.

Thanks

JR