$10 Million Settlement After Waste Management Truck Ran a Stop Sign and Killed a Mother in Kent County
Won by Cannon & Dunphy S.C..
Cannon & Dunphy recovered $10 million for the husband and two children of a 37-year-old woman who was killed when a Waste Management truck ran a stop sign and struck her van in Kent County, Michigan.
What happened
A Waste Management truck came to a stop sign in Kent County, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, and went straight through it. On the other side of the intersection was a van. The truck struck it. The woman driving the van was 37 years old, and she did not survive the crash.
She was married and the mother of two children. A garbage truck runs a fixed route through streets where families live and drive every day. When the driver of a vehicle that size ignores a stop sign, the people in a passing car have almost no way to protect themselves. That is what happened here, and a young family lost the person at the center of it.
The family brought a wrongful-death claim and hired Cannon & Dunphy, the Milwaukee firm founded by William "Bill" Cannon. A Wisconsin firm taking on a Michigan crash is unusual, and it speaks to the kind of cases Cannon was known for. The claim came down to two questions: did the truck driver cause the collision by failing to stop, and was Waste Management responsible for putting that driver on the road. The answer to both was yes.
To recover for the family, the firm had to fix fault on the truck rather than the woman in the van, and to tie the driver's conduct back to the company that employed him. Commercial-vehicle cases also reach into training, routing, and supervision, the choices a hauler makes before a truck ever leaves the yard. The facts came back to the stop sign the truck did not honor.
The matter resolved as a settlement of $10 million for the surviving family. The result appears in the published obituary of Bill Cannon, which lists it among the notable outcomes of his career, and in the firm's own case results. Because the case settled rather than going to a jury, there was no verdict to appeal and no reduction of the amount.
Cannon died in 2023 at the age of 75. He was credited with more paid verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other attorney in Wisconsin history, and his firm reports recovering more than $1 billion for clients since 1985. The Michigan case put another $10 million in the hands of a husband and two children who had lost their wife and mother.
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.