Rear-end accidents are one of the most common types of collisions in Buffalo, Clarence, Williamsville, Amherst and nationwide. After a rear-end accident, determining the crash cause is important in order to determine who should be held legally liable for all losses and damages incurred by victims. In some cases, a driver can be held criminally responsible for causing death or serious injury if he was grossly negligent or was impaired while driving and caused an accident to happen.

A personal injury lawyer knows that law enforcement officers will typically conduct a comprehensive investigation into an accident cause, especially if serious injury or death happened. One part of this investigation may involve asking the motorists who were in the crash to provide their cell phone records.

Cell Phone Records Can Shed Light on Rear-End Accident Causes

According to the Claims Journal, a rear-end accident that has made headlines is currently being investigated. The crash involved Olympian athlete and reality television star Bruce Jenner. There were a total of four vehicles in the chain-reaction rear-end crash that left one person dead. Each of the drivers involved in the accident, including Jenner, has been asked to provide their cellular phone records. If any of the drivers is not willing to turn those records over, it is likely that the sheriff’s investigators who have been assigned to determine the cause of the crash will subpoena the records.

The purpose of obtaining the records is to determine if any of the drivers was either talking on the phone during the crash or was involved in texting during the crash. Talking or texting does not automatically mean you are to blame for causing the accident. However, because these behaviors do significantly increase the risk of a collision due to delayed reaction times and impaired judgment, the fact that you were on the phone or texting can be a strong indicator that you may have been at least partly to blame for causing the rear-end or other accident to occur.

Police will look at your call log to determine if you may have been talking on the phone. Cell phone records provide information on the time a call came in or a time the call was made, as well as how long you were on each call. This makes it very easy for police to see whether you were talking at the time of the crash.

It is a little harder to see if you were texting. The problem is that when you are texting, only the delivery time of the text is displayed on the phone records. The time when you are typing or reading does not show up. However, if there were many text messages sent or received at around the time that the accident happened, this could create a strong presumption that you were probably texting at the time of the collision. In rear-end accidents, the rear driver i usually considered at least partly responsible because he has the obligation to make sure he leaves room to stop if the front driver does. Still, phone records could provide more info on whether the front driver may have alone done something wrong that led to the crash occurring.

Contact a Buffalo accident attorney at the Law Offices of James Morris at 800-477-9044 or visit http://www.jamesmorrislaw.com.  Serving Buffalo, Rochester, Williamsville, Amherst Cheektowaga and surrounding areas. Attorney advertising.