McDowell

This is an action brought under section 377, Code of Civil Procedure, for damages on account of a death resulting from an automobile collision.

About 10:30 P. M. on December 19,1936, the defendant McDowell was driving south from Bakersfield on U. S. Highway 99 in a truck and trailer owned by his employer, the defendant Powell. The trailer was loaded with chickens, piled four crates high. At a point some eighteen miles south of Bakersfield one of the wheels of the trailer came off and McDowell parked the outfit with a part of the trailer extending upon the paved portion of the highway. About forty minutes later the defendant Nier came along in a Packard car, traveling south. He did not see the parked trailer until he was close to it and then swerved to his left and ran head on into a Ford automobile, in which a Mr. and Mrs. Hines were riding, which was traveling north on the east half of the highway. Hines and his wife both died as a result of the collision.

Mr. and Mrs. Hines had been married for only six months. Mrs. Hines had formerly been married to a man named Williams, from whom she had been divorced about ten years. The plaintiff is the daughter of Mrs. Hines by the former…