The $411.7 Million Zoom-Trial Verdict for a Paralyzed Army Veteran, Won by Default Against a One-Truck Carrier That Mounted No Defense and Will Likely Never Pay

On the morning of July 24, 2018, a violent storm was soaking Interstate 10 on the west side of Tallahassee when a semi-truck operated for Top Auto Express, a Pembroke Pines company that owned exactly one truck, came through too fast for the conditions. Trying to avoid a collision, the rig jackknifed, and behind it the westbound lanes dissolved into a chain-reaction pileup that swept up some 45 vehicles.

Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant from Gadsden County, was riding his motorcycle home into the middle of it. With wrecked and stopping vehicles closing around him, he tried to steer for the median to get clear. Before he could, he slammed into a truck stopped in the emergency lane with no lights showing. The crash broke both sides of his pelvis away from his spine and caused severe damage to his colon and urethra. He spent more than six months in the hospital, came out with metal rods through his body and a colostomy, and was left with permanent incontinence, loss of sexual function, and pain that will follow him for life. A man who had made his living as a soldier now walked with a special arm crutch and needed help caring for his three children.

Washington sued in Florida's Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County, with Ben Crump and co-counsel Robert Cox representing him. By the time the case reached a jury, Top Auto Express was the only defendant left, and the procedural posture is the part of this story that has to be told straight. The company had gone quiet in the litigation, lagging on discovery and basic filings until the court entered a default against it on liability. Its attorney, Michael Sastre, withdrew months before trial, and no new lawyer appeared. So when the damages trial was held in late September 2020, conducted entirely over Zoom as the first virtual jury trial in the Second Circuit, there was no defense in the courtroom. Nobody cross-examined Washington as he testified about his roughly $750,000 in medical bills and what his body could no longer do.

On October 2, 2020, the jury returned $411,726,608, a figure reported as the largest trucking verdict in U.S. history and one of the largest awards ever delivered through a virtual trial.

What the number is worth in the real world is a different matter, and no honest account can skip it. Top Auto Express was a single-truck, single-driver operation whose federal operating authority was later revoked, and before trial it had offered $1 million, a figure industry observers read as the likely limits of its insurance policy. Washington rejected that offer. Transportation attorney Kristen Johnson told FreightWaves the verdict showed jurors had free rein to name any number with no defense pushing back, and called the award essentially meaningless for collection. In other words, the $411.7 million is a judgment against a company that no longer hauls anything and has nothing close to that to take. What the trial actually delivered was a formal, public reckoning of what one speeding truck in a rainstorm cost one soldier, entered on the record at a scale no settlement would ever have acknowledged, with recovery in practice limited to whatever insurance existed.