Osgood

This is an action for damages for personal injuries suffered by plaintiff in an automobile collision.

The City of San Diego is a municipal corporation operating under a freeholders’ charter. On February 27, 1935, Solon C. Armstrong was one of its police officers and was driving a city-owned automobile on city business, but not as an authorized emergency vehicle. At the time of the accident the provisions of the California Vehicle Act were in effect and not the Vehicle Code which was subsequently adopted. Therefore, our citations of statute law will be from the former.

On February 27, 1935, Russell W. Osgood, a young man of the age of twenty-three years, was a student in the San Diego State College. At about eleven-thirty o’clock on the morning of that day he was traveling from his classes to his home in a Ford coupe, westerly on El Cajon Avenue, a public street of the City of San Diego. At the intersection of that street with Fifty-sixth Street he was seriously injured in a collision between the coupe which he was driving and the Ford sedan driven by Armstrong. He filed suit against the City of San Diego and Armstrong. The ease was tried before a jury. At the close of…