Kevin Hable was the managing partner of Wyatt Tarrant & Combs earning more than $400,000 a year. He was a former top aide to two Kentucky governors recognized by his peers as one of America’s best lawyers and a healthy. 52-year-old outdoorsman who ran five miles a day.
On Aug. 8. 2005 the lives of Walter and Hable intersected in a violent collision brought together by what his lawyers call “a mind-boggling set of facts and circumstances.”
On that morning. Walter drove her bus through a stop sign at Trevilian Way and Dundee Road and smashed into the side of Hable’s Jeep Cherokee according to court depositions from three witnesses and a police report.
Two days later she testified positive for cocaine; a toxicologist hired by Hable’s attorneys claimed later that the result showed with “reasonable medical certainty” she was high at the time of the accident.
Walter wasn’t injured in the accident. Hable suffered 11 broken ribs a collapsed lung and a traumatic brain injury from which his doctors say he will never fully recover.
Hable has sued TARC seeking $6.4 million in lost income and what could turn out to be many times that in punitive damages. Mediation is set for Tuesday and a trial for Feb. 19 in Jefferson Circuit Court.
“Ever since I was about 8 years old. I had a goal of being a lawyer,” he said in a recent court deposition as he started to cry according to a court reporter’s notes. “And it really hurts … that I will never be in the future what I was before the wreck.”
She also declined to be interviewed but in a deposition in Hable’s case she insisted that she had stopped at the intersection and started using drugs again only after the crash.
In court papers it has said its accident-reconstruction expert — a Texas engineer who has testified in 31 court cases since 2002 — will show that Hable didn’t come to a complete stop and that both he and Walter were driving at about the same speed between 11 and 17 mph when their vehicles collided.
But TARC officials have conceded in depositions that Walter should not have been hired under an agency rule barring employment of anyone convicted of a drug or alcohol offense within five years.
“Everybody is entitled to second chance or even a third chance,” Morris. Hable’s lawyer said in an interview. “But not driving a bus.”
She served as volunteer cheerleader coach at Hazelwood Elementary School where the youngest of her three children was a student according to Family Resource Center coordinator Annette Darnell. In a reference letter later made part of court records. Darnell said Walter was a dedicated parent who recruited assistant coaches and helped raise money for uniforms.
She pleaded guilty in 1999 and was placed on probation on the condition that she attend the Louisville Central Community Centers’ Second Chance Drug Program. In the spring of 2000 she tested positive four times and was sent to the Jefferson Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center and ordered to serve a month in jail.
Six weeks after being released she tested positive again. This time she was ordered to Jefferson County Drug Court which sent her to a drug rehab program at Wayside Christian Mission.
Wayside was “basically asking … employers in the community to give these individuals a second chance … and we said yes,” David Wheat who was TARC’s human-resources director at the time said in a deposition.
Wheat said Walter never would have been hired “off the street” because of the TARC’s employment rules on drug and alcohol convictions. But he said he thought management wanted him to make an exception for the Wayside program.
Executive Director J. Barry Barker said in a deposition that he knew Wheat and John Woodford then TARC’s assistant executive director attended the job fair but he didn’t sanction hiring anyone.
Tom Hectus an attorney that TARC hired for Walter though she is not named as a defendant in the suit said in an interview that “society should try to find employment for recovering addicts.
Wheat said in his deposition that he wasn’t concerned about hiring Walter because he knew she would be subjected to an initial drug screen then random testing as are all 440 of TARC’s drivers under federal rules that required 50 percent of operators to be tested annually.
Wheat also said that despite Walter’s background he thought she should be “treated like anyone else coming into the program” and not be required to undergo additional testing.
But Woodford now retired said in a deposition that because of her background. Walter should have been tested more — although he also said she shouldn’t have been hired “in the first place.”
Hable worked his way through the University of Kentucky graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a 3.8 grade-point average. At UK’s law school he finished in the top four in a class of 178 then went to Washington where he worked in the Justice Department doing prosecutions as an assistant U. S attorney.
Taking leaves of absences he served from 1987 to 1989 as Gov. Wallace Wilkinson’s budget director (Hable had worked for Wilkinson as a student at Wallace’s Bookstore) and from 1991 to 1994 as Gov. Brereton Jones’ cabinet secretary.
He also served on a half-dozen civic boards and committees including the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Greater Louisville Inc.’s education task force which matched volunteers with students struggling to read.
“My strength … was to be ahead of the opponent,” he told a vocational consultant hired as an expert by his lawyers and who was deposed in the lawsuit. “And that meant I knew the case better. I knew the ins and outs all the subtleties. And I could out-think and out-argue my opponent.”
Though all drivers are subject to random drug testing. Walter’s name never came up. TARC officials said in depositions — again without elaboration.
But in October 2003. 16 months after she began driving. Walter was tested after a minor accident in which a passenger was injured. (TARC’s policy requires drug testing after any accident involving injuries.)
Barker defended that decision in his deposition: “My understanding of the federal requirements is that … if someone tests positive they don’t want us firing them they want us rehabilitating them.”
But Paul Griffo a spokesman for the Federal Transit Administration said federal law only requires transit agencies to report employee drug-testing statistics. It’s up to each agency to set its policy regarding drivers who test positive for controlled substances he said.
Wheat who retired the month before the crash said he didn’t know what percentage of drivers had felony drug records but that they would be few and far between.
After repeated work absences. Walter received three warnings and was fired a third time on June 24. 2005 records show. But she was reinstated three days later with a 15-day suspension. Court records show she was able to prove that some of her absences were because of illnesses in her family.
TARC warned Walter then that she would be permanently terminated if she missed three or more days in any 30-day period but the agency failed to back up that threat when she missed five days in the weeks leading up to her collision with Hable.
But Sandra Berman a retired teacher who was walking to the Douglass Loop told police that the bus was going so fast she didn’t think it could have stopped.
The Rev. Steven Johns-Boehme a Christian Church minister who was in a car behind Hable’s agreed. “As quickly … as that bus came through the intersection,” he said in a deposition. “the thought that ran through my mind was the bus didn’t stop.”
At 9:03 a m. the bus smashed in the driver’s side of Hable’s 10-year-old Cherokee knocking the vehicle 28 feet across the intersection into a stop sign.
TARC says its accident reconstructionist will testify that it is likely that the Jeep didn’t come to a stop at the intersection and that both vehicles were traveling 11 mph to 17 mph at the time of impact.
But the investigating officer. Louisville Metro Police Officer Joseph Smolenski determined that Walter was at fault concluding that she couldn’t have reached the speed needed for her bus to inflict the damage it did on Hable’s vehicle if she had come to a stop.
A plaintiff’s expert retired Kentucky State Police Maj. Henry “Sonny” Cease who once ran the state police accident reconstruction program concluded that Walter drove through the intersection at 29 mph while Hable was going 6 or 7 mph consistent with having stopped first.
Hable was found slumped across the front seat unconscious. Eleven of 12 ribs on his left side were broken. He was comatose when he was brought to University Hospital where Greg Haynes was among the first to see him.
Tested a few hours after the accident for drugs and alcohol. Walter’s urine was found to have a pH level so high that a doctor at TARC’s testing company. Occupational Physician Services found it was “suspect in terms of whether it had been tampered with or whether it was indeed human urine,” according to documents in the court file.
A toxicologist hired by Hable’s legal team. Michael Evans. CEO of AIT Laboratories of Indianapolis said in a deposition that the residual level of cocaine showed with a “reasonable scientific probability” that Walter was under the influence of the drug at the time of the collision.
Kevin Hable slowly regained consciousness and was transferred to Frazier Rehab Institute where he spent two months learning to talk and walk and even to swallow again.
His doctors found that he had “significant deficiencies” in “problem solving executive functioning and verbal fluency” and that the injuries to his brain also impaired his balance strength and ability to walk.
When released from rehab he couldn’t take care of himself. Divorced 15 years earlier and with his only child. Clayton in graduate school. Hable paid his brother to move in for six months.
The avid hunter hiker and fisherman struggled with the simplest physical tasks his brother said once getting so angry as he tried to walk that he started crying.
After being fired by TARC following the accident. Walter found a job at a catering company. She said last March in a brief interview that she had been drug-free for 14 months.
She was arrested on Feb. 3. 2006 and charged with trafficking in cocaine when police searched a house on Vermont Avenue and found three rocks of crack cocaine marijuana and Ecstasy — and Walter with $78 in cash in her hand according to court records.
The charges were later dismissed. Her lawyer in that case. Alex Dathorne said charges were dropped because she was one of many people at the house and no drugs were found on her.
“I believe that the word ‘accident’ connotes a lack of design or foreseeability,” he said in his deposition. “And I think the evidence so far at least as it’s been explained to me is pretty clear in this case that the bus driver was completely reckless in running a stop sign and hitting me and that TARC showed a wanton disregard for its duty to public safety.”
Hable reads three newspapers a day and told TARC’s lawyers that he was reading a new English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. But he said his problem-solving skills aren’t improving.
On a typical day he said he goes for physical training in the morning then comes home and reads listens to National Public Radio and watches TV news. “My life feels the same every day,” he said.
Dr. William Kraft former director of brain-injury programs at Frazier Rehab Institute who examined Hable as a plaintiff’s expert said in a deposition that he has sustained a “significant injury to his sense of self,” along with his more obvious injuries.
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