Mobile County Jury Awards $8.5 Million Against Nissan for Airbag That Blinded a Teen Passenger

On Friday, October 5, 2018, a 15-year-old tenth grader was riding in the front passenger seat of a 1998 Infiniti QX4, seat belt on, on her way to her mother's workplace in Mobile. A friend was driving. As the QX4 approached an intersection, a Ford Fusion pulled out in front of it. The collision was minor, with modest damage to the front corner of the Infiniti, but the airbags deployed, and the passenger bag struck the girl in the face while it was still unfolding.

She was taken to two hospitals that evening. Doctors could not fully examine her eyes without risking more harm. Imaging showed a non-displaced fracture of the right eye socket and air in the left socket, both signs of blunt force trauma, and both eyelids were lacerated and had to be sutured shut. She went home bandaged and spent the first night in darkness, afraid she had lost her sight in both eyes. Over the following weeks vision returned in her right eye. It never returned in her left. That eye became blind, and she now wears a painted scleral shield over it in public, which she must remove, clean and reapply each day; an ulcer on the eye once kept her from going to class. She must be seen regularly by an ocularist, and a retina specialist monitors her remaining eye.

The family sued Nissan North America and Nissan Motor Co. in Mobile County Circuit Court under Alabama's extended manufacturer's liability doctrine. Their case rested largely on a restraint-systems engineer, who testified that the QX4's airbag was defectively designed. He said it deployed at speeds as low as about 6.5 mph, the lowest threshold he had seen, that it reached full inflation too late, after the passenger had already made contact, and that safer alternatives existed. Those included front-end crash sensors, which were common on vehicles of that period, tethers to limit how far the bag reached, and a less powerful inflator. An accident reconstruction expert tied the injuries to a flap of the bag slapping her face as it unfurled.

The plaintiff, then 20 and a student at Tuskegee University, told jurors she had given up the softball and volleyball she played before the crash, had trouble with depth perception and stairs, and felt anxious in crowds. Beasley Allen attorneys Evan Allen, Kendall Dunson and Mike Andrews appeared for her, and the judgment on the jury's verdict was entered in June 2023. The jury returned $8.5 million in compensatory damages, all for non-economic harm such as permanent injury, disfigurement and mental anguish.

Nissan moved for judgment as a matter of law, a new trial or a lower award. It had learned after the verdict that two jurors did not disclose during jury selection that they had been defendants in earlier civil cases. The trial judge denied the motions but wrote that he would have granted a new trial had he believed he had the discretion.

On October 31, 2025, the Alabama Supreme Court, with no justice dissenting, affirmed the denial of judgment as a matter of law, holding there was substantial evidence of a safer, practical alternative airbag design. It reversed the denial of a new trial, ruling that the precedents the trial judge relied on did not limit his discretion, and sent the case back for him to decide the motion.