Lucas Gangi, 30, of Sharpsburg, was killed Thursday morning when the driver of a car pulled in front of his motorcycle at the intersection of Palmetto-Tyrone Road and Minix Road in north Coweta County.

The accident occurred at 7:37 a.m., according to Lt. John LaChance of the Coweta County Sheriff's Office.

The driver of the car was apparently attempting to make a left turn headed westbound on Palmetto-Tyrone Road when he failed to yield the right-of-way to Gangi.  The most common cause of a motorcycle crash is the motorists failure to yield.  The motorcyclist tried to take evasive action by laying the bike down to no avail.  Gangi was later pronounced dead at Piedmont Hospital.

Old fashioned greed leads to wrongful death of heart patient.

The children of a former police officer claim that their father's emergency room doctor allowed him to die so the doctor could steal his expensive Rolex watch, according to a lawsuit filed last week.  The ER doctor was indicted last month stemming from the June incident.  The doctor is also facing a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his children.

On June 1, 2009, the victim was rushed by ambulance to the hospital with heart problems. According to a 15-page civil lawsuit, the family alleges that the doctor noticed the expensive Presidential Rolex watch, then allowed their father to die from a heart attack so he could steal the watch.  The lawsuit alleges that two nurses at the hospital noticed the missing watch after their father died and saw a watch bulge in the doctor's pocket.

Two children of a construction worker killed in a chain reaction crash have filed a $10 million lawsuit against the pair convicted of causing their loved one's death.  The wrongful death lawsuit was filed Tuesday.

In their criminal trial both men involved in the deadly crash were found guilty of aggravated involuntary manslaughter and driving under the influence in the fatal wreck, and sentenced them to each serve 2½ years in prison.

The wreck occurred just after midnight on when a construction supervisor was using a tractor in the blocked-off right lane to fill a ditch with asphalt. The left lane was open to traffic. Because the tractor sometimes had to back into the left lane, a flagman was assigned to periodically stop traffic.  According to testimony, one of the drunk driver's Hummer H3 drove past the flagman and struck a blade mounted on the rear of the tractor.  The other drunk driver slammed into the back of the Hummer, which in turn slammed into a nearby dump truck, striking the decedent and cutting him nearly in half.

Evidence revealed that the two drunk drivers had been together at a bar about half an hour before the crash. Police said that one had a blood-alcohol content of 0.19 percent.  The other driver refused to take a breath test but failed a field sobriety check.

Lawyers for victims of the Chatsworth Metrolink crash alleged Tuesday that officials with the contractor that provides crewmen to the commuter rail service knew that the engineer involved in the deadly crash had a history of sending text messages while on duty.

The allegation came from an employee of Connex Railroad, which provides Metrolink with engineers and conductors. The employee, who was not identified, has told lawyers that he had complained to his superiors about the engineer using his cell phone to send text messages. - 4 - 10

The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Tuesday announced the voluntary recall of about 56,000 cribs whose wood slats can break, creating a gap that could entrap or strangle a child.

The recall of Jardine cribs, manufactured in China by Jardine Enterprises of Taiwan, is an expansion of a recall of 320,000 cribs last June. The company has received 19 additional reports of broken crib slats, and a 22-month-old child fell through the gap created by a broken slat. No injuries have been reported. - 5 - 10

Timothy Burke was fine when his father dropped him off at the YMCA Childcare Center in Marblehead on the morning of June 9, 2005.  Even though his best buddy wasn't there that day, Timothy, 3, happily played alone, filling a toy dump truck with mulch, pushing it across the yard and then emptying it. He ended up inside a playhouse built against the side of the Humphrey Street center.  No one's sure what happened next, but about 15 minutes later, the little boy was found unconscious, face down against the back of the toy truck. Less than a week later, on June 15, his parents "reluctantly" made the decision to take him off life support.  Now his parents have filed a wrongful death suit against the Marblehead-Swampscott YMCA, six of its employees and Northshore Ambulance of Salem.  The lawsuit, filed Monday in Salem Superior Court, three years to the day after Timothy's death, alleges that both the YMCA and its employees and the ambulance company and its workers were negligent. The suit charges that day care center employees failed to watch the child and, when they found him unconscious, failed to provide proper emergency care. It also charges that the ambulance company was negligent by failing to properly train its employees or provide them with proper supplies to treat the child. The ambulance workers never used a defibrillator on the boy. - 6 - 10

An anti-bleeding drug probably will stay off the market, experts say, after a rigorous study found patients getting the medication during heart surgery were much more likely to die than patients given other drugs.

Bayer AG, the maker of the drug Trasylol, said it is still deciding what to do and is awaiting details from the Canadian study. Bayer faces dozens of lawsuits claiming Trasylol led to excess deaths and that the company hid evidence of harm.

But experts in Canada and the United States say the study appears to seal the drug's fate, given that several prior studies linked Trasylol to an elevated risk of death after surgery — and studies that didn't find a higher risk had many weaknesses.

The latest study was the first head-to-head comparison of Trasylol, also known as aprotinin, and two other drugs that surgeons use to prevent massive blood loss during heart surgery. The findings were released Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

"In all likelihood, this is the end of the aprotinin story," Wayne A. Ray and C. Michael Stein of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.

Trasylol was approved in 1993 but questions about its safety didn't surface until 2006, when one large study linked it to increased risk of death, heart attack, stroke and kidney failure.

The Canadian study, paid for by the government, included more than 2,300 patients who were at high risk of bleeding or had multiple health problems. They were chosen randomly to receive Trasylol or two other anti-bleeding drugs during heart surgery. The study was stopped early last October when preliminary results showed a higher rate of death in the Trasylol group. Bayer temporarily pulled the drug off the market two weeks later.

"There was no way we could ethically enroll (more patients) in the trial because we had our answer," said lead researcher Dean A. Fergusson, a transfusion medicine expert at the Ottawa Health Research Institute. "I think the results are quite definitive, certainly for high-risk cardiac surgery, and it's going to be very tough to justify its use in lower-risk surgery."

An analysis of the data showed Trasylol increased chances of death by 54 percent, compared to two much-cheaper drugs. Six percent of the Trasylol patients died within 30 days of surgery, compared with 4 percent who got either Amicar or Cyklokapron, despite a slightly lower percentage of the Trasylol patients suffering from massive bleeding or needing transfusions.

The researchers found those who died in the Trasylol group had a much higher proportion of heart complications after surgery, including heart attacks.