Mark and Charlotte Stephens filed the underlying personal injury and loss of consortium action against Lonnie Hypes, as the Administrator of the Estate of Jammie Marie Hypes Stephenson, following a traffic accident in which Mark Stephens was injured and Jammie Stephenson was killed. The jury returned a defense verdict. The Stephenses appeal, arguing that the trial court erred in charging the jury on the doctrine of sudden emergency. Finding no error, we affirm. The record shows that on the morning of August 11, 2000, Mark Stephens was riding in the front passenger seat of a Ford F-150 king cab truck driven by his cousin, Raymon Bullock, when the truck collided with Stephenson’s car, which had spun out of her lane and slid approximately 650 feet after Stephenson swerved to avoid a deer in the roadway. The two vehicles were traveling in opposite directions on Thompson Mill Road, a two lane roadway running along the county line between Hall and Gwinnett Counties. Stephenson was killed in the accident. Stephens’s right femur was driven through his hip socket, causing a dislocation and fracture of his hip, which required surgery, hospitalization, and rehabilitation.
Two eyewitnesses testified at trial. William S. Maddox was driving the vehicle that was directly in front of Bullock’s truck on the two lane road. Maddox testified that a deer stepped into the road and that Stephenson’s car veered left, pulled right, and then started “fish-tailing” and skidding sideways across the road. According to Maddox, Stephenson passed his vehicle and then collided with Bullock’s truck. Maddox testified that Stephenson was traveling “about the regular speed limit, about 50, 55,” when she encountered the deer and that he believed the speed limit was “about 55 miles an hour.” Maddox explained: “She wasn’t flying or nothing like that. When she come over the hill, she was —just a normal speed.” On cross-examination, Maddox was shown a statement that he had filled out for an attorney shortly after the accident. In that statement, when asked about Stephenson’s speed, Maddox wrote: “I have no idea around normal speed, around 50 or 55 miles per hour.” In a recorded statement taken by the same attorney on March 15, 2002, Maddox estimated Stephenson’s speed as “between 50 and 55,” and explained “that was the top speed she was going. She wasn’t going very fast.”
