Wrongful Death

A Moorestown attorney for the estate of Brenda Ripoli has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against her husband, Frank Ripoli Jr., who is awaiting trial on a murder charge in her slaying. Dennis McInerney, administrator of Brenda Ripoli's estate and the legal guardian of the couple's 8-year-old daughter, filed the suit in Superior Court in Burlington County on Thursday, three days before the second anniversary of her death. She was shot in the head and heart in her Medford home as she packed her belongings to leave her husband of 13 years, authorities said.

I wish I had a dog in this hunt. I wish the battle over ditching the estate tax mattered to me personally. It doesn't - but it might. As a typically optimistic American, I, too, hope to have some big bucks to leave when I die - and if I do, I won't much like the government taxing it away. In my view, the estate tax is right up there with the Electoral College on the moronic scale - and I think President Bush is right in wanting to phase it out by 2009. Why should people be taxed twice?

A judge said yesterday that he would not accept a court-appointed lawyer's recommendation that the 5-year-old daughter of a Cape May County dentist who Ford Motor Co. says killed his wife should remain a party to the father's lawsuit against the automaker. In an emergency hearing in U.S. District Court yesterday, lawyers for Ford assailed the report on Alix Thomas, whose father, Eric, blames an airbag for killing his wife in a traffic accident. Released Monday, the report said it was in Alix's best interest to continue the suit against Ford and the airbag's manufacturer and not to seek a claim against her father for the death of Tracy Rose Thomas.

A federal magistrate judge appointed an attorney yesterday to serve as interim legal adviser for the 5-year-old daughter of a man in an unusual wrongful-death suit. Eric Thomas, a Cape May County dentist, sued the Ford Motor Co. last year on behalf of the estate of his wife, Tracy, their daughter, Alix, and himself, alleging that his wife was killed when an air bag deployed improperly in a February 1997 accident. Ford countered that Tracy Thomas was strangled, after medical experts retained by the company said her injuries were inconsistent with those of an air-bag inflation but were consistent with manual compression of the neck.

The mother of Christina Haws, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident while riding her bicycle along Trenton Road in Middletown Township, seeks more than $50,000 in damages from the accused driver and his father. Catherine Bentzley of Fairless Hills filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in Bucks County Court against Russell Adams, 18, and his father, Richard Adams, of Levittown. Russell Adams was charged on March 27 with leaving the scene of the crash that killed Haws of Falls Township at 10:20 p.m. on March 1. He also was charged with three motor-vehicle offenses, including careless driving.

Delaware Valley College has been added to a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the parents of a 2-year-old Perkasie girl killed last year in a crash caused by a driver using a cellular telephone. The suit against the Doylestown college was filed by Robert and Patricia Pena, parents of Morgan Lee Pena, who died Nov. 2 in the collision at Route 152 and Rickert Road in Hilltown Township. The Penas' attorney, Christopher Fallon Jr., noted in the suit that Frederick R. Poust 3d, driver of a 1993 Ford Explorer that hit the Penas' vehicle, is an employee of the college and was on an errand for the school when the accident occurred.

Testimony continued yesterday in the case of an Audubon woman who drove into a Haddon Township lake and drowned during a torrential rainstorm six years ago. Most of the day was spent hearing testimony from Alan Cohen, an engineer and an expert on construction-site safety. "I can state with certainty that there were no acceptable safety devices at the end of the street," Cohen testified in Camden County Superior Court. Victoria Hoffman, 32, was returning to her home with her son, Gregory, on the evening of July 14 when she turned down Carlton Avenue and accidentally drove into Crystal Lake.

Ralph Beswick Jr. believes his father might still be alive if a city 911 dispatcher hadn't sent the wrong ambulance. Yesterday Beswick filed a wrongful-death/civil-rights lawsuit against the city, the dispatcher and the private ambulance company she worked for, claiming his father died because he failed to get emergency treatment in a timely manner. The city dispatcher, Julie Rodriguez, 32, has admitted forwarding a 911 call from Beswick's father's home to CareState Ambulance Inc., of Langhorne, the company she worked for part-time as an emergency medical technician.

A wrongful-death lawsuit against Lower Merion Township and its police department was filed in federal court yesterday by the parents of a Chester County man who was shot to death by a township police officer last month. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court, follows the death of Erin Forbes, 26, a part-time security guard and former Army infantryman, on Jan. 10 on City Avenue. "We think our son was murdered," said Ella Forbes, a Temple University professor of African American studies.

The widow of Olympic wrestler David Schultz has settled her wrongful-death claim for a record amount against John E. du Pont, the multimillionaire who shot Schultz to death nearly four years ago in Newtown Square. The exact award to Nancy Schultz will be kept confidential at the request of lawyers, but those familiar with the drawn-out negotiations say the total will be about $35 million. According to a trade journal that watches such cases, that figure would be the largest award resulting from a wrongful-death suit ever paid directly by one person.