I’m Jimmy Fasig with Fasig Brooks. I want to talk to you about wrongful death cases and who can recover for a wrongful death case. A lot of people don’t know this, but the people that can recover from wrongful death cases are the deceased person’s spouse, the deceased person’s parents, or the deceased person’s children.
The only other people that can recover under the wrongful death statute are the deceased person’s siblings or other blood relatives who are wholly or partly dependent upon the deceased person. So, if you’ve got a brother or sister who dies and if you’re not either wholly or partly dependent on them, then you don’t have any claim against their estate.
Now the estate itself does have a claim- and that’s a topic for another blog. The estate has a claim from lost net accumulations, which would be the amount of money that the person would earn. That may go towards brothers and sisters and other blood relatives if there are no other survivors like a parent or child or spouse.
At the end of the day, the main beneficiaries of a wrongful death case are going to be the parent, the children, or a spouse, or possibly the blood relatives who are dependent or partly dependent on the deceased.
