Selma Personal Injury Attorney

Selma has better crash data than most towns its size. Between 2015 and 2019, the city’s streets recorded 629 reported crashes, including 11 fatal crashes, and six of those deaths involved someone walking or riding a bicycle, according to the Fresno Council of Governments’ 2021 Multi-jurisdictional Local Road Safety Plan (Fresno COG LRSP). A Selma personal injury attorney uses that record to test what insurance adjusters tell injured people, and several things adjusters and neighbors say about Selma crashes do not hold up against it.

Crashes on city streets are investigated by the Selma Police Department, which dates to 1893 and works out of the old downtown passenger rail depot (Wikipedia). On Highway 99, the investigating agency is the CHP Fresno Area, whose Area 435 page names Selma (CHP). With 24,702 residents in the Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimate (Census), the Raisin Capital is small enough that a single crash on Floral or Highland shows up in its statistics.

What follows pairs six pieces of conventional wisdom, the kind repeated at Selma body shops and kitchen tables, with what the plan and the state’s rankings actually show.

Floral, McCall and Mountain View outrank Highway 99

The belief: “Highway 99 is where the bad crashes happen”

Highway 99 has produced terrible collisions near Selma, but the safety plan’s list of the city’s 20 highest-severity locations is made up of city streets. Its top entries, ranked by a severity score for 2015 to 2019, look like this:

Floral Avenue, the main east-west road, holds two of the top six spots, and Highland, the main north-south road, holds the 14th. The Whitson and Gaither location was also chosen for a concept design in the Fresno COG’s separate Regional Safety Plan (Fresno COG RSP). Every location on that list is a City of Selma street, so a faded crosswalk at Floral and Front or a poorly timed signal on McCall points toward a claim against the city itself, with the six-month filing rule that comes with it.

Mid-block walkers on Highland still have claims

The belief: “Crossing outside the crosswalk ends my case”

California divides fault by percentage. Put in Highland Avenue terms, a walker the jury blames 30% for stepping out still collects 70% of proven losses (CACI 405). The point matters in Selma because the safety plan names a pedestrian violation as one of the leading factors in local fatal and severe crashes, next to automobile right-of-way violations and impaired driving. Adjusters read that report too, and they open with it. Someone crossing mid-block on Highland who is struck by a speeding car is negotiating over percentages, not over whether a claim exists; our pedestrian accident page walks through the crosswalk rules that shape those percentages.

Riders face the same argument. The plan logged 29 crashes involving bicyclists on Selma streets in five years, and roughly one in nine of them (11%) killed or badly hurt the rider.

Night crashes leave more evidence than people expect

The belief: “A dark-street crash is my word against theirs”

Night is Selma’s worst category in the state’s 2023 rankings: 11 nighttime injury crashes between nine at night and three in the morning, enough to put Selma 20th of the 103 Group E cities (OTS). After dark, the physical record does much of the talking: crumpled metal shows the angle of a broadside on Mitchell, for example, a burned-out streetlight on Nelson can be documented, and shops along East Floral, the corridor that also holds the large Walmart beside the Highway 99 interchange, are worth asking about exterior cameras before the recordings roll over.

Tip: Go back to the spot in daylight, or send a relative, and photograph every streetlight, stop sign and hedge between you and the other car. The defense will almost always argue about visibility first.

A pileup’s losses are shared

The belief: “The last car in a pileup pays for everything”

On May 10, 2020, a big rig hauling cherries failed to stop in a Highway 99 construction zone near the Mountain View exit and set off a six-vehicle, 15-person chain reaction and fire; an 11-year-old was killed and seven people were hospitalized (KMPH). A pileup like that one is divided among every driver and company whose conduct contributed, which typically brings in the trucking company’s commercial policy and, in a work zone, questions about signs, lane closures and the agency or contractor running the project.

Our truck accident page explains how a cherry or raisin hauler’s logbooks and maintenance history enter a claim. Those trucks are a steady presence here, since roughly 90% of the nation’s raisins are grown within eight miles of Selma (Wikipedia).

A year later, in October 2021, a pickup towing a trailer on Highway 99 at Floral Avenue swerved into a car stopped in the median and killed its 27-year-old driver (ABC30). The hitch, the load and the trailer’s brakes become evidence in a crash of that kind.

A DUI arrest does not bring a fast payout

The belief: “A DUI arrest means a quick payout”

An arrest at the scene helps prove fault and little else; a drunk driver’s carrier still reviews every chart from Adventist Health Selma, questions any break in treatment and compares your bills with its own estimates. Selma’s 2023 rows show 9 victims in alcohol-involved crashes and 7 hurt specifically by had-been-drinking drivers aged 21 to 34, the second figure ranking 24th of 103 (OTS).

Arrests are a separate matter. Officers out of the old depot booked 89 suspected impaired drivers that year, 74th on a list where number 1 has the fewest, which speaks to enforcement effort rather than to crash counts.

The shortest deadline is six months

The belief: “There is plenty of time to decide”

The six-month rule catches the most Selma families off guard:

• Half a year for a written claim to the City of Selma or to Caltrans over a Floral, McCall or Highway 99 defect (Government Code §911.2)
• Two years to bring the injury suit, a period that starts on the day of the Highway 99 or Floral Avenue crash (CCP §335.1)
• Three years for a crumpled bumper or totaled pickup with no injury attached; children follow other rules

Evidence runs on a fourth, faster clock: Floral Avenue store video and the debris on Mountain View usually disappear within days.

Where Selma patients and lawsuits go

No trauma designation comes with Selma’s own hospital, the Adventist Health campus at 1141 Rose Avenue, though its emergency department is open to crash patients (Kaiser Permanente directory). Patients from a bad Highway 99 wreck or a hard pedestrian strike on Highland usually continue on to Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, the single Level I center on the state’s August 2025 list for the whole county (EMSA).

Should settlement talks fail, the lawsuit is filed in downtown Fresno (Fresno Superior Court); civil trials there are held at 1130 O Street, in the courthouse named for B.F. Sisk.

Floral, Highland and Highway 99 questions

My crash happened at Floral and Front. Does the city’s ranking help me?

It is useful background. The ranking shows the city’s safety plan had flagged the corner for its crash history, which matters if street design contributed. It does not decide whether the other driver was careless.

Someone rear-ended me on East Floral near the Walmart. Will that settle easily?

Fault in a rear-end crash is seldom disputed, and the safety plan lists rear-end collisions among Selma’s emphasis areas. The fight is usually over neck and back injuries, so steady treatment notes carry the claim.

Who wrote up my wreck on 99 near the Mountain View exit?

Officers from Highway Patrol Area 435 wrote it, because 99 is a state highway. A collision on Highland, Floral, McCall or another city street is written up by Selma police at the depot instead.

My son was hit on his bike near Whitson Street. What should we do first?

Have him examined, leave the bicycle exactly as it is, and photograph the street. Then order the Selma police report and let us speak with the driver’s adjuster rather than giving a recorded statement.

Our Selma caseload

The Law Offices of Jacob Emrani (Call Jacob) handles injury cases from the Floral Avenue corridor out to the raisin vineyards that surround the town. When we take a Selma case, we check the crash site against the city’s ranked locations, order the Selma police or Area 435 report, and collect the charts from Rose Avenue or Community Regional.

Most of what comes to us from Selma fits the plan’s emphasis areas: car accidents and rear-end crashes, pedestrians and bicycle accidents on Highland and Mitchell, big-rig and pickup crashes on 99, drunk-driving collisions and wrongful death claims. Not every Selma case is a crash; we also take dog bites and falls on slick floors or broken walkways at local businesses.

We charge Selma clients nothing up front and nothing at all unless we win, and the first meeting can happen at your home near Floral or at Community Regional. (888) 952-2952 connects you with us, the case evaluator works from a phone, and calljacob.com/es serves Spanish-speaking households around the raisin vineyards.

Selma readers should treat these LRSP rankings and filing rules as general information, not legal advice tailored to their crash.

Sources

1. LRSP Part 2 — Fresno COG
2. RSP 2021 — Fresno COG
3. Selma 2023 rankings — OTS
4. City estimates — Census
5. Fresno Area 435 — CHP
6. Selma, California — Wikipedia
7. Cherry truck pileup — KMPH
8. Floral median crash — ABC30
9. Rose Avenue hospital — Kaiser Permanente
10. Trauma centers — EMSA
11. Court locations — Fresno Superior Court
12. Government Code §911.2 — Legislature
13. CCP §335.1 — Legislature
14. CACI 405 — Justia