Box Truck Failure to Yield Left a 90-Year-Old Community Volunteer Wheelchair-Bound. Her Case Settled for $10.3 Million.
Won by Breit Biniazan, Pfeifer Law (co-counsel) and Saunders, Patterson and Mack (co-counsel).
A 90-year-old Virginia woman who spent her days running her church food bank and delivering meals to disabled neighbors was left permanently wheelchair-bound after a box truck ran an intersection without yielding, and recovered $10.3 million in a pre-trial settlement resolved on January 28, 2025.
What happened
On August 31, 2022, a 90-year-old woman was riding as a passenger in a friend's car, returning home from lunch and an afternoon of sightseeing, when a commercial box truck failed to yield at an intersection and struck the vehicle. All occupants were injured. For the plaintiff, the collision set off a prolonged course of surgeries.
Before that afternoon, she had been a fixture in her community. She ran the food bank for her church and spent most of her days delivering meals to homebound and disabled residents. The accident ended that life entirely. Surgery repaired her broken bones, but chronic pain complications left her dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Kevin Biniazan and Jeffrey Breit of Breit Biniazan in Virginia Beach led her legal team, joined by Alexis Bale of the same firm, Paul Mack of Saunders, Patterson and Mack in Chesterfield, and Bob Pfeifer of Pfeifer Law in Williamsburg. The case involved contested discovery from an early stage. Counsel obtained court orders to compel depositions, and the two months before trial brought more than two dozen motions in limine resolved across nearly a dozen hearings.
Mediation did not produce a resolution. The defendant company waited until within a week of the trial date before offering $10.3 million to settle all claims. The plaintiff accepted. The settlement was finalized on January 28, 2025.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related car accident verdicts
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A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.