A teenage girl run over by another student's truck in a school parking lot has been awarded nearly $84,000 in damages.
Kayla Araujo, now 19, sued ICBC for her injuries and losses after suffering three broken ribs, a collapsed lung, disfigured nose and other injuries on March 12, 2009.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge found the pickup driver was totally at fault.
Kayla was 15 and in Grade 10 when she and other kids got off the school bus in front of Kelowna Secondary School. She was in the middle of a pack of students crossing the parking lot to the school's north Raymer entrance when her phone fell out of her jacket pocket.
Dakota Vincent, 17, had been sitting in the driver's seat of his pickup, which was parked in a stall close to Raymer Avenue. He was talking to friends by his side of the truck.
More than 60 students were passing the rear of his truck when Kayla bent over to pick up her phone. She was facing away from the truck and bending from the waist. Before she could retrieve the phone, Vincent backed up the truck.
It pushed her onto her face and knees, and a rear truck wheel drove over her shoulder.
"She screamed. She had her friends beside her," said Connor, a Grade 11 student at the time.
Kayla's brother Jordan alerted Vincent and he stopped. He and other students helped lift the back of the truck and Jordan dragged her out from under it. Her face was bleeding and her nose torn.
"She was in shock," Connor said. "She walked to the sidewalk and everyone told her to lie down. She waited for the ambulance."
Vincent argued Kayla was partly to blame. The judge ruled he knew students regularly crossed the parking lot and he had full opportunity to see the buses unloading.
Vincent should have known a student might drop something behind his truck and disappear momentarily from view to pick it up. He failed to check his mirrors properly, the judge said.
Kayla was in the fetal position when the tire went over her shoulder. The weight fractured her collar bone and hurt her left shoulder and hip. She now has a scar on her nose and a finger. She relives the accident in dreams and her doctor says she has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Kayla needed physiotherapy, treatment from a kinesiologist and a program to rehabilitate her leg muscles. The court awarded her $83,756, $70,000 of it in non-monetary damages.