Report: Tenth Death Linked to Faulty Goodyear Tires

A tenth death has been linked to the Goodyear G159 tire, which allegedly blows out at “dangerous” rates, according to a Tuesday report from Jalopnik. In 2004, Ruth Sheehan was killed while her husband drove their RV back from Maryland, after a tire blew out and she was thrown out of the vehicle. Jalopnik reports that Sheehan’s family, acting on poor advice from an engineer and lawyer, did not sue the company or file a complaint—but at the time of Sheehan’s death, Goodyear had “received several hundred reports about the tire,” and had “about two dozen injury and death claims related to failures.” Sheehan was the tenth to die in a crash that included a G159 failure, according to a previous Jalopnik investigation that detailed Goodyear’s alleged attempts to bury evidence of the tire’s failures. They note that a series of lawsuits have claimed that Goodyear knew of the G159’s deficiencies, but the company has never issued a recall or a public safety warning on the product.