'Fortified' Mailbox Owner NOT Liable for Driver's Injuries

This is from the Ohio Supreme Court.

[CinJyxxe]

A few years back, there was a story on my social media about a guy whose mailbox was constantly being hit by the neighborhood plow service. He made a lot of complaints, but it only seemed like complaining pissed them off, because he was noticing that the mailbox was being hit MORE frequently, not less. So he fortified it in a similar way to this story, basically turning it into a steel box mounted on a rebar-reinforced concrete post. He then called the plow company and warned them not to hit his mailbox again.

Apparently, not long after, he was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a collision and screeching metal. The plow truck was practically wrapped around the mailbox, which appeared to be basically unscathed. In the post, the guy mentioned that the tracks looked like the plow truck deliberately went out of their way to hit the mailbox, completely ruining the plow and totalling the vehicle. I don't remember if the company tried to sue or if the driver was injured or what, but the guy who posted the story just seemed pleased that he wouldn't have to keep replacing his mailbox.

[geofjones]

I was a mail carrier on a rural route. One man's mailbox got smashed by kids driving by with a baseball bat. He replaced the box, soon the same thing happened. He welded up a box from 3/8" steel plate, installed it. It got hit the same way. I heard through the grapevine that a kid had a broken wrist, elbow and permanent nerve damage from "falling down".

[ianbattles]

All drivers have an obligation to AVOID hitting stationary objects.

[solinvictus]

The fact that you can get sued for someone else's stupidity and/or mistake is the dumbest concept in this country. Someone tried to sue me once because their brat hopped my fence and fell in my under construction pool and broke their leg. Thank god I had a security camera back there that showed that the kid clearly entered my yard illegally and I had a padlock on my gate leading to the front of the house which gave me an expectation of privacy which the kid violated. The fact I had to jump through hoops to prove that my backyard is my private property and no one should have been back there other than myself or the guys building the pool just shows how stupid this sue happy country is

[LeftCoastStephen]

Back In the 70’s & 80’s, I worked sales for a pre-cast concrete company that made large steel reinforced planters. Our best customer was a local city that used them to replace wooden planters they had used for many years. The first sale was quite large age we sold 2-3 replacements every year for ones hit by cars. They liked the concrete one because, even though they didn’t survive any better than the wooden ones, the cars weren’t able to just drive away and the replacement was on their insurance and not the taxpayers.

[Gunns]

A while back a farmer in my home county kept getting his mailbox taken out. He figured it was on purpose because he had a kid in high school that was picked on. He had enough and dug a deep hole and placed a steel pipe in the hole and cemented it in. He then welded his new home made all steel mailbox to the pipe. A while later he heard a loud crash in the middle of the night and went down his drive with his flashlight and saw a pickup truck wrapped neatly around his pipe, but his mailbox was still standing. In the truck were three teenage boys from his kids class messed up and bleeding. He did not get charged and those boys learned a valuable lesson.

[douglashoward]

In Guilford CT they had snow plow drivers playing a game of who can plow the closest to the mail boxes. They destroyed thousands 0f mail boxes. One guy sick of replacing his mailbox 5 to 6 times every winter. Fortified his mailbox that he moved back 10 ft onto his property. When a plow hit it? It broke the clamps holding the plow on the truck. They needed a payloads to load the plow on the truck. They sent him a 15000 dollar bill. He refused. The town maintenance manager came with the police threatening to arrest him if he didn't pay. He introduced the post master of CT to them. The post master laid down his paperwork and said we don't know which drivers hit the 750 mailboxes this year. But we know this driver hit this one. And if you arrest this man because your man hit his box? We're going to hit you man with 750 counts of destruction of federal property plus 350 dollar fine times 750. The town rolled up their papers . and he never heard from them again.

[hawleygriffin]

Back in the 70' there was crew in my area that was knocking off mail boxes by driving by holding a tire iron out the window. A guy I know who owned a gravel pit had lost his box multiple times, rebuilt his box by sinking a "H" beam and then bending some 8 gauge steal from old hopper he had at his gravel pit. A few weeks later the vandalism crew was making their rounds and when the kid in the front seat holding the tire iron hit the box, instead of knocking the box off, it ripped the tire iron out of his hand, went through the open rear passenger window and hit the kid sitting behind him in the face. He was hurt really bad. ICU for several days. Weeks in the hospital. They tried to sue the guy who beefed up his box, but it went nowhere.

[Icewind]

I feel like if that had been allowed, people would be very quick to "accidentally" run into houses for money.

[felsinferguson]

Next door neighbor (happened to be my uncle) kept getting his mailbox clobbered by county snowplows. Sometimes as often as half a dozen times per winter. County claimed it was his problem, and refused to replace them after about the third one. The years go by, and after about 5, he was sick and tired of replacing his mailbox due to lazy plow drivers. His cure was to sink a chunk of 12 inch I-beam six feet deep, leaving 2 feet sticking up. Then he put a 55 gallon drum, with enough of a cutout in the bottom to fit, over the I-beam. Sunk the drum about a foot, then filled it with sand. Into the sand he sunk a 6 inch thick fencepost, then mounted his mailbox on it. Sprayed the whole thing hunter-orange, used a hose to make sure the sand was good and soaked, and waited for winter. Time passed, winter came, the wet sand froze into a solid block around the I-beam. Probably couldn't have moved it with a bulldozer. End of January rolls around, and a jeezer of a snowstorm hit. Plows rolled. Nothing the first pass. Nothing the second pass. Nothing the third pass. At a little after 3AM the next morning, I (and everybody else in the family) awakened to a god-awful noise, and the house shaking. We got to looking around, and there's a County Road Commission snow plow laying on its side in our front yard, with a mangled Vee-plow semi-sorta-kinda attached, and most of the front-end just barely attached to the rest of the truck, and a dumptruck load of salt/sand mix spread from here to next week along a trail of debris and gouged ground.

As near as anybody could reconstruct the scene, the plow driver lifted the plow to cross the railroad tracks, dropped it again once across, and punched the go-pedal. Somewhere in the 500 or so feet between the railroad tracks and the mailbox, he picked up a good bit of speed, oozed a bit too far right, and clipped the (quite thoroughly frozen) mailbox at what the state police investigators said had to be at least 40MPH (road was pegged for 35), mostly ripping the plow and front of the truck off the chassis, spun the truck end-for-end at least three times based on the tracks, rolled it, flipped down the embankment into the ditch in front of our house, flipped again once it got to the bottom of the 10-ish foot embankment, and came to rest about 15 feet from our front door - about 100, maybe 125 feet from the mailbox.

Road commission TRIED to pin something on my uncle, but failed miserably, since to hit the mailbox (even with the Vee-plow on the front) the truck had to be nearly 6 feet off the pavement, practically driving in the ditch. Driver of the plow was dazed and confused, but otherwise undamaged, but the truck was a total write-off.

The mailbox? The 55 gallon drum was partly torn off the frozen block of sand, but the ice/sand block was still standing, and the mailbox itself was completely untouched and usable 'til spring, when it was rebuilt. Oddly enough, it never got hit again in the 15 or so years I lived in that house before striking out on my own.

[NorthernWindNut]

There ARE usually laws against "booby trapping" because of the danger it poses to first responders. It would be very difficult to convince a judge that a sturdy mailbox counts as a booby trap.

[dougtripp]

Many years ago my neighbors and I had a problem with kids driving by and smashing our mailboxes. I'm a welder so I made mine with some schedule 80 pipe. Getting home shortly after I was met by some police officers and informed that a kid drove by, hit my mailbox with a baseball bat, which broke and went through the back window and knocked another kid out and was in the hospital with skull fractures. I was informed that I might face a civil lawsuit, but if that happened, i could just call the police officers. I soon did get served a lawsuit so I called the police. They called the Feds who charged all 4 boys in the car with destruction of government property and the local police charged them with criminal mischief and a few other things. The lawsuit against me was quickly dropped and I made a lot of money making mailboxes for my neighbors.

[flowerpt]

This reminds me of when somebody built a giant snowman around a 10' tree stump in the middle of their yard and some ass thought it would be funny to drive through the snowman to obliterate it.
Stay on the road, people.

[kegginstructure]

In an unincorporated area just west of New Orleans, a guy's house kept on getting impacted by vehicles because kids liked to speed around a corner and, as kids, they got sloppy with their driving (not to mention occasional alcohol involvement). Drivers kept on hitting his house. He put up some yellow & black warning signs on steel posts similar to the ones used to hold up street signs. They got knocked over three times and his porch kept on getting crunched. So finally he put up new warning signs mounted on steel railroad rails anchored in concrete about six feet deep. The next such incident involved a car that actually bent the rails a little. The porch was intact but the car was totaled. The driver lived, sued for damages, and lost. PLUS was fined for failure to maintain control of a vehicle.

[tinaleanne]

I know of two similar stories:
1) Halloween someone was frustrated people kept intentionally running over his large pumpkin. Found the biggest they could, filled it with concrete resulting it a totaled truck.
2) Winter someone kept running over their snowman. They built a new snowman in another place around a tree stump. Another totaled truck.

[racoming]

A local farmer got tired of his barn getting hit on a corner. He put jersey barriers around the barn. They been hit a dozen times and sued each time. Court tossed every case for same reasons in this video.

[joshcheatham]

Imagine going to court arguing "it's your fault I got hurt driving through your yard".

[iainballas]

So we live out on a country road, but decided to get a P.O. Box since the mailbox was always targeted for vandalism/theft. Our mailbox was the first of five on a single post, with a long T-Bar on the top. Our neighbor's boxes also got bashed down with a bat, and we got a witness who said the culprits were five teens in a car. They drove down slowly, smashing them in horizontal swings. So we filled our box with cement, and left it there to shield the others.

Two months later, a car crashes nearby. Three teens and two bats in the car. A week later, they sue us: Claiming that they lost control of the vehicle when attempting to smash our box, as the person who'd swung the bat had *hit a solid concrete block with a filled metal bat*. Shattered his own arm, and screams made his driver crash.

The court threw it out, forced them to pay for our damaged fence, forced them to apologize to *everyone on the street*, and to pay for *everyone's box* that they had ever hit, to get a brand new one. But for almost two weeks, it looked like we would have to buy them a new car, and pay almost 25k in medical bills.

[CurtisDrew]

Saw a report where an Old Navy Sailor mounted his mailbox on top of a half buried ships steel anchor after having his mailboxes run over for almost 2 years. He finally tiered of having someone destroy his mailbox repeatedly so he buried it in such a way that if someone intentially ran over the mailbox and which was out of the right of way, the anchors tip would pivot up and snag the vehicle as it ran over it. Sadly the Sheriffs own son ran over the mailbox, striking it at high speed with his drivers side fron bumper. The anchors tang came up through the bottom of the boys Camaro and impailed the boy though his legs. Rendering him invalid. Had he driven at it and struck it with the passengers side he would have walked away from his totaled car. And this crash ruined his College Football Scholarship. His Father (the Shreriff) came to the crash sight and threatend to kill the mailbox owner. He did this in front of the Highway Patrol Officers and was subsequently removed from his Job by the City. He was out of control anyway. So good riddance!

[UncleKennysPlace]

How many immoveable objects are within range of an out-of-control car? Light poles, utility poles, walls, buildings ...