Fatal Hit-and-Run on West Atlantic Blvd. in Margate: What Running Can Do to a Wrongful Death Case

Gregg Hollander | July 23, 2026 | Accident News

This one landed in my inbox early this morning. A pedestrian was crossing West Atlantic Boulevard last night in Margate when he was struck by a pickup truck and killed. The driver didn’t stop. He was found this morning in Hollywood and arrested on a charge of leaving the scene of a crash involving a death. 

Setting aside what the criminal case does with that decision, I want to focus on something different: what fleeing actually does to the civil case, both in front of a jury and with the insurance company that’s going to be paying attention to every part of this long before it ever gets near a courtroom.

What a Jury Actually Does With Hit-and-Run Cases

A jury doesn’t need a specific legal instruction to react to the fact that someone left the scene of a fatal crash rather than stay. That single fact tends to color how jurors see everything else about a defendant: their credibility, their account of events, and how much benefit of the doubt they’re entitled to going forward. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t need to be argued into the record with expert testimony. It simply sits there, and jurors weigh it the way any reasonable person would. 

That matters enormously for how a case like this actually gets resolved, because the overwhelming majority of civil cases never reach a jury at all. They settle. And insurance companies spend a great deal of time trying to predict exactly how a jury is going to react to their insured before they ever let a case get that far. A defendant who fled the scene of a crash that killed someone is about as unfavorable a set of facts as an insurer can be handed, and that shapes settlement negotiations long before anyone picks a jury.

Does Fleeing Change What a Driver’s Insurance Has to Cover?

This is a question I get asked more than people might expect, and the answer surprises most people. Leaving the scene doesn’t retroactively turn the crash into something outside a driver’s insurance coverage. The negligent act that causes the death happens before the driver makes the decision to keep going. Those are two separate acts. An insurance policy generally covers the negligent driving that caused the collision regardless of what the driver did in the moments afterward, because the coverage attaches to the crash itself, not to how the driver behaved once it was already over. 

Insurers sometimes still look for an angle to argue that a driver’s conduct was so far outside ordinary negligence that it falls into an intentional-acts exclusion, but fleeing after the fact is a poor fit for that argument, since it says nothing about his state of mind at the moment the crash actually happened. In practice, this means that a victim or their family isn’t likely to find the path to a hit-and-run driver’s insurance any more complicated because they ran, even though the decision to run may end up costing them a great deal in front of a jury or at the negotiating table.

Between how a jury is likely to receive a defendant who fled and the fact that their coverage generally isn’t meaningfully disrupted by that decision, the practical effect of running here isn’t that it changes who pays. It’s that it changes how much leverage the victim or their family has.