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(303) 798-8546
Between 2005 and 2019, more than 500 people died from injuries sustained in dog attacks, with rottweilers and pit bulls accounting for more than three-fourths of those fatalities. Serious or fatal dog attacks are rare, but they are not unheard of.
If you have lost a loved one from injuries sustained in a canine attack, call Arckey & Steele, Attorneys at Law, to speak with a Denver fatal dog bite lawyer for an explanation of your right to recover compensation from the dog’s owners under Colorado law. Our dog bite attorneys have more than three decades of experience helping injured victims negotiate significant settlements and work to achieve maximum compensation awards.
Colorado law facilitates the recovery of damages for fatal dog bites through two separate avenues: wrongful death claims and survival actions. Each avenue applies to different types of damages, and different prospective beneficiaries can file them.
After a fatal dog bite, the victim’s spouse, children, parents, or other legal heirs could recover wrongful death damages from the dog’s owners. This may cover the economic and non-economic losses that you suffered on account of the victim’s death, including lost future earnings and emotional support. You must file a wrongful death lawsuit within two years of the victim’s death, but if the victim was married, only his or her spouse may initiate the lawsuit during the first year.
The fatal dog bite victim’s estate representative has the right to file a survival action against the attack dog’s owners to recover damages for medical costs and expenses, lost earnings, and the pain and suffering the victim experienced between the date of the attack and the date of their death. These are the same damages the victim could have recovered had they survived the attack. Only the victim’s estate representative may initiate a survival action, so you must coordinate the probate of the victim’s estate with the survival action. You must file the survival action within two years of the victim’s death, which means that a probate court must approve the appointment of the estate representative before the survival action’s two-year deadline.
Families and estate representatives may file concurrent wrongful death lawsuits and survival actions, but the timing and procedures for each require careful coordination. If you intend to pursue both avenues in Denver, make sure you retain a knowledgeable and experienced fatal dog bite attorney to ensure you do not forfeit your opportunity to recover the full compensation you and your family deserve.
Under Colorado law, a strict liability standard applies to fatal dog bites. This means that, to recover damages to reimburse direct economic losses, such as medical expenses and lost earnings, you do not need to prove that the attack dog’s owners were negligent. However, you do need to prove negligence to recover non-economic damages for pain and suffering, or similar injuries, in both wrongful death lawsuits and survival actions.
To prove negligence, a fatal dog bite injury lawyer in Denver could use the evidence about the dog attack to show, for example, that the dog’s owner:
In some cases, a dog owner may engage in several of these behaviors.
For the best chance to recover fair and full compensation after a beloved family member dies from a dog bite, please call the offices of Arckey & Steele, Attorneys at Law, to retain the services of an experienced Denver fatal dog bite lawyer. Unlike high-volume personal injury law firms, we offer targeted representation that focuses on personal attention to each client’s legal needs, and we aim to deliver the highest quality outcomes in all dog bite cases.