Taxi Passenger With Bilateral Femur Fractures and Brain Bleed Settles for $500,000 After Hit-and-Run Cab Driver Is Caught on Dashcam

On a September 2015 evening in Charlotte, Margaret Linville, a 58-year-old visitor from New Mexico, was a passenger in a taxi when a second cab made a sudden maneuver that forced her driver to swerve. The taxi struck a telephone pole. The driver of the second cab left the scene without stopping.

Linville's injuries were severe. She sustained comminuted fractures of both distal femurs, fractured ribs, and a traumatic brain injury that included a temporal lobe hemorrhage. The combination of orthopedic trauma and a brain bleed placed her among the most seriously injured survivors in Charlotte taxi cases of that period.

Attorneys Hunter Gillespie and Herbert Auger of Auger and Auger took the case and faced an immediate challenge: identifying the fleeing driver. Gillespie obtained dashcam footage from the second taxi, which showed the cab failing to yield the right-of-way and then accelerating away from the scene. The recording established both fault and flight.

The footage pointed investigators to Rachid Oufquir and his company, Taxi USA LLC. Two other defendants, driver Habtom Tesfaye and his company City Cab, LLC, were named initially but dismissed after the investigation confirmed they bore no liability for the collision.

With liability resolved through the dashcam evidence, the parties reached a settlement on January 17, 2018. Oufquir and Taxi USA LLC paid $500,000 to resolve Linville's claims in Mecklenburg County Superior Court (Case 17-CVS-8253).