(KNOX) – A judge has ruled that the wrongful death case of a 30-year-old Fargo man who died in a crash in Rolette County can go forward, building on a fifty year old legal precedent in North Dakota that abolished blanket governmental immunity for public duty matters.
A Highway Patrol release describing the crash that killed Cody Wolthuis in 2023 said his pickup collided with a semitruck hauling grain. He did not yield at the intersection of County Road 15 and 89th Street NE, located between Rolette and the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.
Wolthuis was not wearing his seat belt and he died when he was thrown from the pickup into a nearby ditch. The grain truck also entered the ditch and caught fire, and the 25-year-old driver was seriously injured.
The intersection where the crash happened was supposed to have stop signs for east and westbound traffic. The stop sign for westbound traffic was there that day, but the sign that was supposed to warn eastbound traffic, where Wolthuis was supposed to stop for oncoming traffic was gone. The sign itself was missing and the post it stood on was lying in the ditch before the crash happened.
A little more than a year after the crash, his girlfriend, Misty Longie brought a wrongful death suit against Rolette County, claiming the county failed to maintain a safe intersection and the stop sign at that intersection. She also claims that if the sign was up, it would have warned Wolthuis that oncoming traffic didn’t stop.
Rolette County argued that they were immune to the claims made against them because of the North Dakota Century Code and interpretive case law.
The judge granted Longie’s motion and denied the county’s immunity defense on June 17. A trial is scheduled to start next spring.
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