A pregnant mother who was hit by a pickup truck while pushing a stroller across a street in Toco Hills with her husband and three small children, has settled her claims for $1.5 million.

Her main injury was a broken leg with medical bills totaling about $170,000, but her lawyer said the policy-limit settlement reflected not only her difficulties in delivering a baby shortly after the accident but also those entailed by religious proscriptions forbidding her from touching her husband until she had taken a ritual bath—which she could not do with the bandages.

According to case documents and Tobin Injury Law principal Darren Tobin, Devorah Levenson and her husband are observant Orthodox Jews. According to Jewish law, women are supposed to have a ritual cleansing bath, or mikvah, after giving birth.

Levenson delivered her baby five days after the accident but, Tobin said, it was several months before she could take the full-immersion bath, which her surgeon had forbidden because of her injury.

During that time, her husband could not touch his wheelchair-bound wife or help change her dressings.

“That disrupted the family in ways that most people cannot imagine,” said Tobin, noting that they could not even hand the newborn to each other, but “had to place the baby in the crib and then pick her up so as to avoid accidentally touching each other.”

“This really made it a difficult way to live, especially with a newborn and three toddlers,” he said.

According to Tobin and case filings, Levenson was in a crosswalk last July when the defendant driver, Vitaly Barr, turned off of Lavista Road and hit her.

Levenson was pushing two children in a stroller, and they were sent flying as well, Tobin said.

“Fortunately, they were strapped in,” he said. While one child suffered a bruised forehead, they otherwise escaped injury. Levenson suffered a broken left tibia.

Doctors at Atlanta Medical Center reassured Levenson that her unborn child was OK, but they were unable to give her adequate pain medication because of her condition.

Tobin filed suit on behalf of Levenson and the three older children in DeKalb County State Court in September.

In a demand letter to Barr's insurance carrier in April, Tobin said the accident and aftereffects on Levenson and her husband, Yehuda, were profound and demanded the combined limits of $1.5 million.

“The way we maximized the value [of the case] was demonstrating with depositions and various testimony that the loss of consortium claim was significant,” Tobin said.

The case was never mediated, and it was declared closed on May 29 once a settlement was reached weeks after discovery.

Defense attorney W. Dale Ellis, Jr. of State Farm's in-house counsel, Sharon W. Ware & Associates, did not respond to a request for comment.

“Dale Ellis handled this case very professionally,” Tobin said. “He was an absolute gentleman to work with.”