$245,000 Settlement for Woman With Spinal Injury After Loaded Dump Truck Struck Her Car and Tipped Over
Won by Brown & Crouppen.
After a speeding dump truck swerved, struck her stopped car and tipped over in front of her, Brown & Crouppen settled Mary Bourne's spinal injury claim for $245,000.
What happened
In 2016, Mary Bourne was stopped at a Jefferson County, Missouri intersection in her 2013 Chevrolet when a dump truck loaded with topsoil came up behind the same light. According to her attorneys, the truck was moving too fast to stop. Rather than brake, it swung into a turn it could not hold, struck her car, and rolled onto its side directly in front of her.
"Because of the truck's speed, it tipped over right in front of her," said Richard Zalasky, one of her attorneys at Brown & Crouppen. "Fortunately, it didn't crush her." The fully loaded truck came to rest feet from the Chevrolet.
Bourne, who was 61, suffered spinal injuries along with other harm from the impact. She went through pain-management injections rather than surgery. Her lawyers said an operation was not recommended because of her age and several preexisting conditions, which complicated both her recovery and the way the defense valued the claim.
Bourne sued the parties behind the truck, naming Arnold Ready Mix Inc., LKM LLC, and the driver, Richard Bourbon. The case was filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court as 17JE-CC00294. Zalasky and Seth Hicks of Brown & Crouppen handled the claim. The defense, led by Peter Dunne and Robert Plunkert, took the position that she had recovered well. The truck's insurer was Bitco Insurance.
The two sides reached a settlement of $245,000, entered June 19, 2019. Because the case resolved by agreement and not a jury award, there was no verdict to appeal and no remittitur. "The good news was that she recovered well from the injuries sustained, and we were able to reach an agreement that everybody was satisfied with," Dunne said.
The payment covered Bourne's medical treatment and her remaining symptoms from a crash in which a loaded dump truck tipped over just in front of her stopped car.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.