Fatal Accident Caused by Miscalculated Accelerator…Former Special Investigator Ace, Accuser of the Accident, Sues Toyota for “False Accidental Accident”.

Mr. Ishikawa was “fainting under stress”.

So how did the Lexus start?　That day, Mr. Ishikawa stopped his car on the street in Ebisu 2-chome to pick up his golfing friends. When he stopped the car, he did not put the shift lever in parking (P range) and left the engine running, because his Lexus has a function to keep the foot brake applied even when the shift lever is in drive (D range). When Mr. Ishikawa was about to get out of the car because his golfing friends had arrived, the Lexus started moving. According to Mr. Ishikawa’s side of the story, the situation at that time was as follows.

He opened the driver’s side door to get out of the car and rotated his body to the right, using his hip as a fulcrum, and put both of his legs out of the car. Then, with both feet still outside the vehicle and neither foot touching the road surface, the vehicle (the Lexus in which Mr. Ishikawa was riding) suddenly began to start at a low speed, as if in a creep phenomenon, even though the plaintiff (Mr. Ishikawa) was not pressing the accelerator pedal… (omitted in length). (from the complaint).

He says that his foot was out of the car, but the car started on its own.

Of course, since he was convicted, the evidence shows that Mr. Ishikawa stepped on the accelerator pedal. In the criminal trial, the prosecution presented evidence such as the pressure marks made when the accelerator pedal was pressed to the maximum and the analysis record of the car’s accident recorder, which were found to be true. In other words, the criminal trial concluded that Mr. Ishikawa’s recollection that he did not depress the accelerator pedal was mistaken. At the time of the accident,

At the time of the accident, he was driving at a high speed of more than 100 km/h, which caused him to faint due to emotional stress caused by fear and shock to the point of death” (from the plaintiff’s claim in the judgment in the civil trial).

Considering the extreme circumstances of the accident and the fact that he was 78 years old at the time, it is not surprising that Mr. Ishikawa’s memory of the accident, in which he said he did not step on the accelerator pedal, was different from the actual accident. ……

Ishikawa was a well-known ace of the Special Investigation Department, appointed as a prosecutor in 1965, and rose to prominence as a special investigator in the Lockheed case in 1976. In 1992, when the Special Investigations Bureau filed a summary indictment against former LDP Vice President Makoto Kanemaru in the 500 million yen black-market donation case, Ishikawa, who was then a prosecutor at the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office, persuaded the top leadership of the LDP to investigate Kanemaru for tax evasion, and in 1993 he succeeded in arresting him.