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HALL COUNTY, Ga. -- An insurance company went after a disabled woman in a wheelchair after she was hit by a truck. The woman called Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Jim Strickland to find out why.
Teresa Holcombe (pictured) said she has a chronic lung disease and diabetes. "I can't hardly walk without getting out of breath so they put me in a chair," said Holcombe.
Last December, she was in that chair, toting an oxygen tank, crossing a busy Gainesville intersection. There is no light or crosswalk at the intersection. The car in the near lane stopped for her.
"That lady said I could go and I thought I could and when I did, by the time I got to this side, that truck just plowed me one," said Holcombe.
A landscaper's pickup truck in the next lane slammed into Holcombe.
"My shoulder is out of place for the rest of my life, I had five staples in the back of my head and my leg has two chipped bones in it," said Holcombe.
Holcombe's lung condition meant she couldn't take anesthesia. But her latest medical challenges aren't the end of the story.
"They’re suing me saying I did almost $2,000 worth of damage to that pickup truck," said Holcombe. "It floored me."
Auto Owners Insurance sued Holcombe for negligence and demanded that she pay the $1,779.07 repair bill.
"They want every dollar they can get and they need this extra $1,780 from my client," said Holcombe’s attorney William Hardeman.
Hardeman said he thinks the insurance company saw dollar signs but didn't think about the public relations issues that go along with suing a woman in a wheelchair.
"I think the insurance company may rue the day they filed this suit," said Hardeman.
Hardeman is now countersuing and investigating the driver's record. Meantime, Holcombe said she continues to wheel through life on a $688 a month benefit check. She said paying for the man's truck would bust her.
"All the money they’ve got, why are they trying to sue somebody on Social Security in a power wheelchair," asked Holcombe.
Auto Owners Corporate Headquarters refused to answer any of WSB-TV’s questions but soon after Channel 2’s Jim Strickland started asking them, they hired a different attorney and dropped their suit against Holcombe.
Holcombe is pressing on with her suit against the insurance company and the owner of the truck.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From WSB-TV in Georgia:
