$12 Million for Two Families After an Overloaded Cement Truck Ran a Red Light in Waukesha County
Won by Cannon & Dunphy S.C..
Cannon & Dunphy recovered $12 million for two families after an illegally overloaded cement truck ran a red light in Waukesha County, killing a van's driver and leaving a passenger with permanent brain injuries.
What happened
A cement truck loaded past its legal weight limit came up to an intersection in Waukesha County and went through a red light. It hit a van that was crossing on the green. Trucks are held to weight limits for a reason. The heavier a truck is, the longer it needs to stop, and the more force it carries into anything it strikes. A truck that is over its limit is harder to control in the exact moment when control matters most.
The crash killed the driver of the van. A passenger survived but was left with serious brain injuries that are permanent. Two families carried the loss out of that intersection, one grieving a death and one facing the long, expensive work of caring for someone whose life had been changed for good.
Cannon & Dunphy represented both families. The firm built the case on the condition of the truck and the conduct of its driver. The truck had been loaded beyond what the law allows, which cut into its ability to brake and added to the damage when it hit. On top of that, the driver ran a red light. The overload and the running of the signal were the two facts the firm set out to prove, and together they described a crash that did not have to happen.
The result is documented in two places. The firm's own case list records $10.2 million for the passenger who suffered the permanent brain injuries. The published obituary of firm co-founder William "Bill" Cannon lists a combined $12 million for the two families among the notable results of his career. The matter resolved as a settlement. There is no public record of an appeal or any reduction of the amount.
Cannon, who died in 2023 at the age of 75, was credited with more paid verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other attorney in Wisconsin history. His firm reports recovering more than $1 billion for clients since 1985.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Cannon & Dunphy S.C.
All Cannon & Dunphy S.C. proven verdicts →A Walworth County jury found Waukesha Memorial Hospital liable after a nurse pushed air into a two-week-old premature infant's IV line during a blood transfusion, sending emboli to his brain and leaving him with permanent quadriplegia and no usable speech.
A Milwaukee jury verdict and a related settlement delivered $25.24 million to a family after an unlicensed first-year resident spent 11 hours treating their teenage daughter for constipation while a twisted bowel killed the tissue it fed.
An Ozaukee County jury awarded the estate of Judith Cisewski $15 million after a retaining wall at her Port Washington senior living campus collapsed and buried her under concrete blocks for roughly two hours; she died the following day.
The family of a three-year-old girl who died of E. coli traced to contaminated beef at a South Milwaukee Sizzler reached a $13.5 million settlement, among the largest food-borne-illness recoveries in the country.
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.