Pedestrian Accident Lawyer in McAllen

A car outweighs a person by a couple tons. That’s why pedestrian crashes in McAllen tend to leave real damage: fractures, head injuries, months away from a paycheck. The company insuring the driver has already factored that in, and it won’t wait long before trying to close your claim out cheap.

Crossing outside a crosswalk doesn’t erase a driver’s duty

A marked crosswalk isn’t where a driver’s responsibility starts and stops. Texas traffic law requires drivers to stay alert for people on foot on any street, whether that’s a striped crossing on 10th Street or the middle of a quiet block near home. That duty travels with the driver everywhere they go.

Insurance adjusters lean on this anyway. A favorite move is pointing to where you were standing, what you were wearing, or whether your phone was out, then arguing you share the blame. Some of that might even be true. It still doesn’t wipe out your claim. Under Texas’s fault rule, you can recover money as long as your own share of fault stays at 50% or below; your payout just gets trimmed by that percentage. Cross the 51% line, though, and the claim disappears.

Think twice before giving a recorded statement

The at-fault driver’s insurance company may call within a day or two, asking to record your account of the crash. You’re allowed to say no, or to wait. Nothing forces you to answer on their schedule instead of yours, and a rushed answer given while you’re still hurting rarely works out in your favor.

Save your energy for the details that matter instead: get names and numbers from anyone who saw it happen, take pictures of the scene before it changes, and request a copy of the official crash report once it’s filed. McAllen’s after-a-crash checklist covers the rest, and it applies just as well on foot as behind the wheel.

What your claim can include

A pedestrian hit by a car often ends up with more than a fender-bender’s worth of injuries: fractures, a concussion, nerve damage, surgery followed by weeks of rehab. That’s what happens when several tons of moving metal collides with a person who has nothing to absorb the hit.

Your claim can account for every piece of that: the ER visit and every follow-up after it, wages you didn’t bring home during recovery, care you’ll still need down the road, and pain and suffering, the harder cost to put a number on. See how those pieces add up to a claim’s total value.

You have two years, not forever

Texas law gives you two years from the day you got hurt to file a personal injury lawsuit (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003). Miss that window and the courthouse door closes, no matter how strong your case was.

Two years feels generous right after a crash. It shrinks fast once you’re waiting on medical records, tracking down a witness who’s moved, or going back and forth with an insurer in no hurry to pay you. Reaching out early keeps more of that clock working for you instead of against you.