$550 Million Wrongful-Death Verdict After Driver Hit 107 mph on Drugs and Alcohol
After trial: Nevada caps punitive damages at three times compensatory damages, which exposes the $500 million punitive portion of this verdict to reduction toward roughly $150 million if that cap is applied on appeal; no appellate ruling has been reported yet. The verdict is against an individual driver, Kevin Raspperry, whose insurer had already paid policy limits to the vehicle's owner rather than to him, so the judgment against him personally is largely uncollectable.
Won by Bighorn Law.
A Clark County jury awarded $550 million, $50 million compensatory and $500 million punitive, to Nimfa Escobia after her husband Marcial was killed by a driver traveling 107 mph while impaired by alcohol, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and marijuana.
What happened
In 2019, Marcial Escobia was on his way to church in the Las Vegas area when Kevin Raspperry ran an intersection at 107 miles per hour, more than double the posted 45 mph limit. Raspperry had been up through the night and was carrying four substances in his system: alcohol, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and marijuana. The crash killed Marcial and left his wife Nimfa with serious injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The civil case, filed as Case No. A-21-842834-C in Clark County District Court before Judge Mark Denton, reached trial in October 2024. Attorneys Kimball Jones, Jacqueline Bretell, and Josh Berrett of Bighorn Law represented Nimfa Escobia. The defense was handled by Jason Fowler and George Ranalli of Ranalli Zaniel Fowler and Moran LLC.
Jones presented evidence of Raspperry's speed, his multi-substance impairment, and the deliberate nature of his choices the night before the crash. The defense had limited ground to contest liability given the toxicology and physical evidence. The central dispute at trial was the scale of damages, particularly whether the jury would impose punitive damages and at what level.
On October 11, 2024, the jury returned a verdict of $550 million: $50 million in compensatory damages to Nimfa Escobia and $500 million in punitive damages. CVN, which covered the trial, reported the result in a staffed article the same week. Vegas Legal Magazine later described it as the largest verdict for a single plaintiff in Nevada history.
The punitive award faces a legal constraint on appeal. Nevada law caps punitive damages at three times compensatory damages when compensatory damages exceed $100,000. Applied to the $50 million compensatory figure, that cap would reduce the punitive portion to $150 million, bringing the total to roughly $200 million. Jones acknowledged the cap publicly after the verdict. A separate settlement between the vehicle owner's insurer, USAA, and the plaintiff was reached before trial; Raspperry himself did not settle.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
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