Brian D. Chase

Chilling video from another police vehicle showed Newport Beach Police Officer Brian McDowell in his Ford Explorer squad car drifting onto the wrong side of the road, narrowly missing a head-on collision and crashing into a tree. Injured, he was forced to leave his job.

Since that 2015 incident, Chase of personal injury firm Bisnar Chase has uncovered other crashes involving police officers in Ford Explorers that were caused, he alleges, by a design flaw that allows carbon monoxide to leak into the vehicles' cabins and sicken occupants.

"I'm noted for doing auto defect cases across the U.S., and this is no exception," said Chase, who has filed suits against Ford Motor Co. for McDowell and for officers in Texas, Florida and Louisiana. McDowell v. Ford Motor Co., 30-2016-00866952-CU-PL-CXC (Orange Co. Super. Ct., filed Aug. 1, 2016). Trial is set for April 12, 2021.

"When Officer McDowell had his crash, he reached out to me and it became clear from his medical records that he suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning," Chase said. "Imaging studies of his brain made the condition clear."

A lengthy investigation led Chase to conclude that the vehicle's design allows it to suck in its own exhaust due to the airflow configuration near the tailpipe.

"But this vehicle is Ford's biggest moneymaker, and they have kept the problem quiet," Chase said, by issuing a technical service bulletin that alerts dealerships to apply a fix only when vehicles are brought in for service. "I call those 'silent recalls,'" Chase said.

He added that he has established that Ford's Police Interceptor model could not pass Ford's internal carbon monoxide concentration standard. "So rather than fix or redesign the vehicle, Ford chose to change the standard so it could sell it to police agencies."

Ford's lawyers contend that the carbon monoxide levels in the vehicles are too low to cause harm.

"Even if that's true for family use, police officers keep their cars running all day long, and they tend to be in their cars all day long," Chase said.

He likened the situation to that of people using Johnson & Johnson's talc products--Chase is on the plaintiffs' executive committee in that set of product liability case over claims the talc causes ovarian cancer--because while both talc and carbon monoxide may cause less harm in cases of occasional use, the cumulative effect can be deadly, he said.

There have been no settlement talks with Ford, Chase said. The Newport Beach case will be the first trial. "This is so new that Ford doesn't know how much trouble it's in," he said.

-- John Roemer