The $2.53 Billion Ford Super Duty Roof Crush Verdict for a Georgia Couple Killed in Their F-250, One of the Largest Injury Verdicts in American History, Settled Confidentially Seven Months Later Before Any Appeal Was Decided

On August 22, 2022, Debra Mills, 64, was driving her 2015 Ford F-250 Super Duty near Bainbridge in Decatur County, Georgia, with her husband Herman, 74, beside her. She lost control coming through a right-hand curve. The truck ran onto the shoulder, hit a drainage culvert, traveled roughly 80 feet through the air, and came down upside down. The cab roof collapsed onto the couple. Debra Mills died at the scene. First responders spent roughly 26 minutes cutting Herman Mills free from the wreckage; he died later at a hospital in Florida.

Their three sons, James "Dusty" Brogdon Jr., Ronald "Rusty" Brogdon, and Jason Mills, sued Ford in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, Columbus Division, before Judge Clay Land. Butler Prather LLP tried the case, with James E. Butler Jr. leading a team that included Ramsey Prather, Daniel Philyaw, and Allison Bailey, joined by co-counsel from Page Scrantom and Bondurant Mixson. Their case was that the roofs on 1999 to 2016 Super Duty trucks, about five million of them on the road, were too weak to protect occupants in a rollover, and that Ford had known it for two decades from testing and from a long trail of prior roof crush lawsuits. Ford answered that the crash was simply too violent, that the driver lost control, and that juries in three earlier trials had found the same roof design not defective.

The trial ended in two verdicts on back-to-back days. On February 13, 2025, the jury awarded $30,524,000 in compensatory damages for the wrongful deaths and the couple's pain and suffering, assigning 85 percent of the fault to Ford. On February 14 it added $2.5 billion in punitive damages. The combined award was the largest verdict in Georgia history and one of the largest injury verdicts ever returned in an American courtroom. It surpassed the previous Georgia record, which Butler Prather also held: the $1.7 billion punitive verdict against Ford in Hill v. Ford, a 2022 Gwinnett County case over the same roof design that killed Melvin and Voncile Hill.

What happened next matters as much as the number. Ford called the verdict "impermissibly extreme and not supported by the evidence," moved for a new trial, and argued in the alternative that the punitive award should be cut to $4,675,000. None of that was ever decided on the merits. In September 2025, court filings showed that Ford had settled both this case and the Hill case, which an appellate ruling had sent back for retrial. The terms are confidential. The $2.53 billion was never collected as awarded, and no one outside the case knows what the family actually received. As the settlements were being finalized, Judge Land unsealed a filing in which the plaintiffs accused Ford of improperly interrogating jurors after the verdict, a charge Ford disputed; the settlement closed that fight too.

What remains on the public record is the jury's work: a finding that the F-250's roof was defectively designed, an 85 percent share of fault against Ford, and verdicts totaling $2,530,524,000 entered on the docket in Columbus.