John Burke

An Essex County jury awarded Sandra Szell $28.6 million after Kessler Institute aides mishandled a toilet-to-wheelchair transfer that fractured her spine and left her paralyzed from the chest down, though a confidential high-low agreement capped her actual recovery.

Jack D'Avila, a concrete laborer on a scrap-metal shredder installation in Jersey City, was struck on the head by an unsecured 20-foot extension ladder on May 18, 2005, fractured his cervical spine, and two days later suffered an anoxic brain injury when his ICU surgeon did not intubate him before he went into respiratory distress. He spent three years on a ventilator and died in July 2008. After a four-month trial in Middlesex County, a jury found the site owner Hugo Neu, the installer Femco Machine Company, and trauma surgeon Patricia Schrader liable and awarded his estate, widow, and two children $7,346,363, entered as an $8.54 million judgment with interest. The Appellate Division affirmed the verdict and judgment in a published 2015 opinion, remanding only indemnification questions among the defendants.

Walter Tirrell, a 28-year-old oiler on a gas-line crew, was standing in a closed lane on Route 31 near Ringoes on November 12, 1986 when a 45-foot flatbed tractor-trailer carrying a backhoe backed up two or three trailer lengths without a signalman or an audible alarm and rolled over his chest, killing him in front of his coworkers. His widow sued the trailer's manufacturer, Rogers Brothers Corporation, under the New Jersey Product Liability Act, arguing the trailer was defectively designed because it shipped without a back-up alarm that cost about $35. A jury awarded $2,500,000 for wrongful death and $50,000 for his conscious pain and suffering, and the Appellate Division affirmed in a published May 1991 opinion.

Joseph DeHanes, a 38-year-old Westinghouse machine operator with a wife and two young children, went to the Raritan Bay Medical Center emergency room in 1992 with a tear in the inner lining of his aorta. Emergency physician Michael Rothman did not diagnose it, the aorta ruptured and bled into the sac around his heart while he was still in the emergency room, and he died. A jury found that with proper care he had a 70 percent chance of survival and awarded his family $2,025,000. Dr. Rothman appealed over the plaintiff lawyer's summation, and the Appellate Division and then a unanimous New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed in April 1999, overruling the old rule that kept juries from hearing an aggregate figure for future lost earnings.

Jennifer Burden was a passenger in her sister's car when it was struck by another driver on November 19, 2017, leaving her with herniated discs at five levels of her neck and lower back, foot drop, and headaches. After the at-fault driver's policy was exhausted by settlement, her own carrier, Mid-Century Insurance (Farmers), refused a $300,000 arbitration award and offered $25,000 on her $400,000 underinsured-motorist claim. An Essex County jury in April 2024 found her damages were $4,500,000. The court molded the verdict to $517,350.44, the policy limit plus fees, costs and interest, and the Appellate Division in March 2026 affirmed the dismissal of her bad-faith claim against the insurer.