Serious Personal Injury & Wrongful Death Litigation

Pestotnik + Gold LLP handles serious personal injury or wrongful death matters. Typically, we are only involved where serious injury or death results. For example:

Saylor and Lastrella families
Our firm, in conjunction with The Gomez Firm, currently represents the Saylor and Lastrella families, who lost four of their family members in a horrific traffic accident. On August 28, 2009, off-duty California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor and his wife Cleofe, both 45, their 13-year-old daughter, Mahala, and 38-year-old brother-in-law, Chris Lastrella, were all killed after the 2009 Lexus ES 350 in which they were traveling accelerated uncontrollably and crashed in Santee, California. The accident has drawn international attention and has been credited as the event that launched an international recall of millions of vehicles by Toyota in an attempt to remedy the cause of the sudden unintended acceleration. We recovered $10 million from Toyota in phase I of the case and are in the process of pursuing the remaining defendant as well. MORE

Wolowsky v. Bum Steer Restaurants Inc.
Our firm represented a widow who watched her husband die after a drunk driver swerved into oncoming traffic, killing her husband. The case was unique because the drunk driver was on her way home from work after drinking alcoholic beverages at the restaurant/bar where she worked. We carefully constructed an argument demonstrating the employer’s liability and avoiding California law that otherwise would limit liability for bars providing alcohol to customers. Although the defendant business responsible for serving the alcohol was no longer in business at the time of the litigation, we were able to achieve an excellent result for our client by collecting the full amount of insurance which covered our claims against the restaurant/bar. MORE