PINNED inside an overturned Ford Explorer on Interstate 5 in Bakersfield, Gabriel Koloszar looked up to see her friend Paulo Aguilar hanging unconscious from his seat belt, his blood dripping down on her.
Rescuers pulled Koloszar out through the windshield. When she tried to stand, another passenger cried out: "Oh my God, Gabby. Your feet!" Only then, she recalled, did she look down to see her mangled flesh.
The trauma of that morning turned to outrage after Koloszar and Aguilar sued U-Haul International Inc., alleging that the accident was caused by a defective tire on the trailer they had been towing.
When their attorneys sought to inspect the tire and rim, they were told that would be impossible.
The evidence had disappeared.
A Kern County Superior Court judge declared in December that he would sanction U-Haul for "extreme negligence" in losing the evidence. Two weeks later, a federal judge in Ohio penalized U-Haul for similar conduct in a separate case.
U-Haul, the leader of the do-it-yourself moving industry, has repeatedly lost, altered or discarded truck and trailer parts sought by injured customers who sued the company, a Times investigation found.
In some cases, the company scrapped or repaired damaged parts in defiance of court orders that they be preserved as evidence.
At least twice, judges have imposed on U-Haul an exceedingly rare and severe sanction for misconduct in a civil case: throwing out the company's defense and entering judgments in favor of plaintiffs who needed the missing evidence to pursue their claims.
U-Haul said that the few instances of lost or spoiled evidence were purely accidental and that "the complexity of managing equipment across thousands of locations" sometimes led to mistakes.
Although it is not uncommon for parties in litigation to be accused of destroying or discarding documents, legal experts said it is unusual for it to happen with physical evidence.
It is unknown how many times this has occurred in lawsuits against U-Haul. No independent source gathers information on such cases.
U-Haul said judges had sanctioned it for spoiling evidence in "at best, a handful of cases" and had never ruled that it had done so intentionally. Asked for a list of those cases, U-Haul said: "We do not have such a list."
