$12 Million Verdict After MAX Transit Driver With Prior Fainting Episodes Blacked Out and Overturned Bus
Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys represented ten of the fifteen passengers who sued the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority after a MAX Transit bus driver lost consciousness and overturned a loaded bus into a ravine in Fairfield, Alabama. On December 11, 2017, a Jefferson County jury awarded $12 million, including $6 million in punitive damages, after hearing that the authority had kept the driver behind the wheel despite two prior fainting episodes.
What happened
On February 9, 2015, a MAX Transit bus operated by the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority was running its route through Fairfield, Alabama, with more than twenty passengers aboard. Behind the wheel was Reginald D. Thomas. Somewhere along the route, Thomas lost consciousness. The bus left the road, overturned, and came to rest in a ravine.
One passenger, Charlsye Williams, saw the driver going under and ran to the front of the bus, trying to reach the controls before it went over. She paid for it with her leg: her right foot and ankle were mangled so badly in the rollover that surgeons had to amputate below the knee. Other passengers up and down the bus suffered injuries of varying severity in the crash.
What turned the case from an accident into an indictment of the transit authority was what the litigation uncovered about Thomas's history. Evidence presented at trial showed he had passed out twice before while operating MAX buses in the Birmingham area, and that the authority, aware of both episodes, had taken no meaningful action and kept him driving passengers.
Fifteen of the crash victims sued in Jefferson County Circuit Court, in a case captioned Charlsye Williams, et al. v. Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority and Reginald D. Thomas, tried before Judge Annetta Verin. Sara Williams and Brandon Bishop of Alexander Shunnarah's Birmingham firm represented ten of the fifteen plaintiffs.
On December 11, 2017, the jury returned a $12 million verdict against the transit authority and its driver. Six million dollars of the award was punitive, the jury's answer to an agency that had twice been warned its driver was blacking out behind the wheel and put him on the road anyway.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys
All Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys proven verdicts →Christopher Pracht, now with Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys' South Carolina team, was trial counsel for the estate of Zerihun Wolde when an Horry County jury returned a $20.73 million verdict against Lack's Beach Service, the private company staffing lifeguards on the stretch of Myrtle Beach where Wolde drowned in a rip current in 2018. The South Carolina Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the verdict in July 2025, and the case is credited with ending the dual-role lifeguarding model on Grand Strand beaches.
Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys took U.S. Army veteran Zachary Lucas's case to trial after Progressive offered $12,500 for a crash that fractured his skull and left him with permanent brain damage. On November 7, 2019, a Jefferson County jury unanimously awarded $18 million.
Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys' Andrew Moak, with co-counsel from Turnbull, Holcomb & LeMoine, won a unanimous $15 million wrongful death verdict on August 5, 2022, for the estate of a nine-year-old boy with sickle cell anemia who died in 2013 while in the custody of the Alabama Department of Human Resources. The Montgomery County jury found the boy's DHR caseworker and foster caregiver responsible for delaying the medical care that could have saved him.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.