$8.2 Million Verdict After Retread Tire Blowout Kills Two Women on US-93
Won by Beck Amsden & Stalpes.
A Missoula County jury awarded $8.2 million, including $5.2 million in punitive damages, after Les Schwab sold a retread tire installed on the front steer axle of a cement truck that blew out on US-93 near Ronan, killing two women.
What happened
On May 21, 1999, a Polson Ready Mix cement truck was traveling along US Highway 93 near Ronan, Montana with a retreaded tire mounted on its left front steering axle. The tire blew out. The driver lost control, drifted into oncoming traffic, and plowed head-on into a Ford Escort. Two women in the car, Marisa Wolverton, 45, and Heidi Lee Martinez, 31, were killed.
The tire at the center of the case had been retreaded twice. Les Schwab Tire Centers sold it and, through its member dealership Mission Mountain Tire, had it mounted on the truck's front steer position. The lawsuit alleged that Les Schwab marketed these retreads as 'all-wheel position tires' without adequately warning customers that placing them on the front axle of a heavy truck posed severe risks at highway speeds.
Court records showed Les Schwab's own internal guidance acknowledged that retreads should not be used on front steering axles unless a large truck was traveling under 50 miles per hour for fewer than 50 miles at a stretch. The company sold the tires anyway without passing that warning to buyers. Monte Beck represented the families of both women at trial.
On January 28, 2005, a Missoula County jury returned a verdict of $8.2 million. Roughly $3 million covered compensatory damages, split among Les Schwab of Oregon, Les Schwab of Montana, Polson Ready Mix, and Mission Mountain Tire. The remaining $5.2 million was punitive: $5 million against Les Schwab Warehouse Center of Oregon and $200,000 against Les Schwab of Montana. Together, the Les Schwab entities were on the hook for nearly $7 million of the total award.
Judge Douglas Harkin reviewed the punitive award post-trial, as Montana law requires for damages of that scale, and upheld it in full. He found that Les Schwab's conduct showed 'an indifference to the high probability of injury to the traveling public.' The $8.2 million verdict stood.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Beck Amsden & Stalpes
All Beck Amsden & Stalpes proven verdicts →A Gallatin County jury awarded $15 million to Catharine Hudgens after her husband Lew died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their honeymoon cabin at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, returning what the plaintiff's firm described as more than double the county's previous largest verdict.
John Amsden served as co-lead counsel for hospital employees whose employers secretly accepted $26 million from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana in exchange for six years of exclusive coverage, inflating the workers' health-plan premiums.
A Gallatin County jury awarded the widow of Gerald Lutz $815,400 against National Crane Corporation after the 28-year-old groundman was electrocuted when an uninsulated crane cable touched a 7,200-volt power line in 1989. The Montana Supreme Court held the manufacturer's misuse and assumption-of-risk defenses should not have reached the jury. It ordered the jury's 20 percent fault share for Lutz removed and the full verdict reinstated, less a $110,000 settlement credit.
Beck, Amsden and Stalpes co-counseled 98 Opportunity, Montana landowners through 13 years of litigation against ARCO over arsenic deposited by Anaconda's copper smelter, ultimately settling the case in 2021 after it twice reached the Montana Supreme Court and once reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Related product liability verdicts
Sullivan Papain was among the firms representing New York State against Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard, securing a $25 billion recovery through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.
C. Steven Yerrid, the youngest of Florida's 11-lawyer 'Dream Team,' added racketeering and conspiracy charges that tripled the damages ceiling, helping the state secure what was then the largest civil settlement in American history against the tobacco industry.
As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.