Suing Your Sister

Your sister is killed in a car accident helping you move across country and the insurance companies refuse to cover your injuries. What do you do? Sue the dead sister.

Yvonne Woods died trying to help her sister.

Her thanks? A lawsuit — by thatsister, Janice Carroll. Carroll accuses Woods of negligence in a 2006 car crash that injured Carroll and killed Woods. Carroll seeks unspecified damages from her sister's estate for physical and emotional trauma she suffered from the accident.

The crash happened when Woods was helping drive Carroll from College Park to Phoenix, Ariz., where Carroll was relocating for a new job. The suit has Woods' family stunned and angry.

Carroll didn't offer any warning before deputies came to serve it.

"It's a disrespectful thing toward my mother and her kids," said Mary Owens, Woods' oldest daughter who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. "She went on this trip trying to help her sister. To come back and try to get something from her and her kids, it's shocking. She's a greedy person."

Not true say Carroll's lawyers, who filed the suit in Fulton County Superior Court.

They contend if there's a villain here, its the insurance companies that have refused to pay off even though Carroll was seriously injured in the crash that killed her sister.

Carroll's lawyer, Arthur Nilsen of Roswell, said his client never wanted to sue her dead sister's estate. The suit filed in Fulton County Superior Court should force insurers to pay, Nilsen said.