Lawyer Uses Old RV to Prove Asbestos Exposure

August 18, 2006 - An Oakland, California lawyer is helping win her client’s case in a rather unusual manor.  Simona A. Farisse, who is currently representing a 33-year-old preschool teacher who developed mesothelioma by hanging around with relatives in the auto repair industry, recently purchased an old RV on Ebay so that she could prove the presence of dangerous asbestos materials.

Farisse currently represents Rebekah Price, whose grandfather and two uncles worked at a Riverside (CA) Chrysler dealership in the 1970s, performing brake and transmission repairs on motor homes and trucks, according to an account by Matthew Hirsch of The Recorder.  The young woman took a leave from work in October 2004 due to severe chest pains.  She was diagnosed with mesothelioma this past January.

Using information gathered from her newly purchased RV, which was towed to a lab in Georgia and stripped down for analysis, Farrise hopes to show that the asbestos materials used in certain car parts are much deadlier than auto makers lead one to believe.  The RV contained many of its original factory-installed parts.

Lawyers note that this case is indicative of many that have been surfacing across the country, “shifting away from industrial workers and over to their family members who came in contact with contaminated clothes and suffer from what's known as secondary, or take-home, exposure.”

According to the article, when attorney Farisse sent the 1972 Dodge Fargo to the lab for extensive testing, she asked the technicians there to search for blue and brown asbestos fibers, in addition to the white ones they would normally expect to find in automobiles.  Asbestos defendants have argued that white, or chrysotile, asbestos is not dangerous and that there is no proven link between white asbestos and mesothelioma.

The results, which Farisse plans to use as evidence, showed a mix of all three fiber types in the automatic transmission bands, plus a fourth asbestos fiber, Anthophyllite, latched onto flat, coated rings in the forward clutch.

"It was a potpourri of poison," Farrise explained.