Couple Settles Lawsuit Over Collision With Steer

REDDING —  An Elk Grove couple has settled a lawsuit against an auction yard for injuries they suffered when their car hit an escaped steer last year, the couple’s attorney said.

Leigh Feasel, 33, and her husband, Arthur, 36, will be paid $2 million by the Shasta Livestock Auction Yard, said Russell Reiner, a Redding attorney representing the couple.

The Feasels and their two young daughters were traveling north on Interstate 5 in May 1999 when their 1997 Ford Escort struck a 1,000-pound steer that was running south in the northbound lanes.

The bones in Leigh Feasel’s face were shattered, requiring 12 surgeries so far, and she suffered a brain injury that has not yet healed, Arthur Feasel told the Redding Record Searchlight. She suffers from double vision and vertigo and can’t drive a car, said her husband, whose neck and shoulder were badly wrenched in the crash.

Arthur Feasel said that he and his daughter Chantelle, who was 9, still have nightmares.

Auction yard employees told California Highway Patrol investigators that about 30 minutes before the collision, the red-and-white-faced Hereford had jumped over a fence.

Andy Peek, whose father, Ellington, owns the auction yard, said Thursday that his family recently spent about $50,000 to install two cattle guards and surround the entire property with cyclone fencing.

“That woman was hurt bad,” Andy Peek said. “It was a sad, sad, deal.”

The Feasels are bitter that those safeguards weren’t put into place a long time ago.

Next month the family’s Kaiser health insurance policy, for which they have been paying $1,100 a month since the accident, will expire, and they fear that no other firm will insure them because of their medical and psychological problems.

Kaiser wants hundreds of thousands of dollars from the settlement as reimbursement for the family’s medical expenses to date, Arthur Feasel said. Add that to attorney’s fees and deduct living expenses, and there’s not much left, he said.

“All we want to do is be free, yet it’s all about the insurance. It’s all about dollars,” Arthur Feasel told the Redding Record Searchlight. “It hasn’t fixed anything. The rest of our life is all uphill.”