$7.1 Million Verdict for Pedestrian Struck in Denver Crosswalk
A Denver jury awarded $7,110,624 to Deysi Cari after she was struck by a vehicle while crossing a marked crosswalk with the right-of-way, with the defendant having admitted liability before trial.
What happened
On a morning in the Eastmoor neighborhood of Denver, Deysi Cari was crossing the intersection of East Quincy Avenue and East Eastmoor Drive in a marked crosswalk when Natalie J. Vona Messersmith's vehicle struck her. Cari had the right-of-way. Messersmith did not contest that fact, and liability was admitted before the case went to the jury.
With fault off the table, the trial before Judge Jill Dorancy in Denver District Court (Case No. 2023 CV 31539) became a fight over the full scope of Cari's injuries and what she had lost. The trial ran from September 23 through October 1, 2024.
Darin Schanker and Michael Stegman of Bachus and Schanker, LLC led the plaintiff's trial team, joined by co-counsel Jessica Reynolds of Pendley, Baudin and Coffin, LLP and Zachary Wool of Barrios Wool, LLC. Together they built the damages case across nine days of testimony.
The jury returned a verdict of $7,110,624. With pre-judgment interest of $2,428,793.60 added, the total judgment entered against the defense reached $9,539,417.60. Law Week Colorado listed the result among its Top Verdicts of 2024, and TopVerdict.com ranked it the eighth-largest verdict in Colorado that year.
The Colorado Court of Appeals took up the matter under case number 25CA0185 in 2026. The appellate court affirmed the judgment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.