Client Refused Surgery, but Carter Mario Still Secured $337,433 UIM Settlement
Won by Carter Mario Injury Lawyers.
Attorney Melissa Brescia obtained a $337,433 underinsured motorist settlement for Joshua Jeudy after a three-car Connecticut accident, successfully arguing that the recommended surgery was a matter of if, not when, even though Jeudy had declined the procedure.
What happened
Joshua Jeudy was injured in a three-car collision in Connecticut, a crash that left him with injuries serious enough to warrant a surgical recommendation. He declined to go under the knife. That decision gave the defense a ready-made argument: if the plaintiff would not have surgery, how severe could his condition really be?
The at-fault driver's coverage fell short of Jeudy's losses, so the case moved to a claim against his own underinsured motorist policy. Attorney Melissa Brescia of Carter Mario Injury Lawyers took on the assignment of demonstrating that the insurer owed its policyholder full compensation despite the gap between what the underlying coverage paid and what the injuries were worth.
Brescia's central argument was straightforward: Jeudy's refusal of surgery did not mean he would never need it. When the insurer asked why it should pay for a procedure the plaintiff had not undergone, she countered that the medically recommended surgery still had to be treated as a probable future cost. It's a matter of if, not when, she told them, keeping the focus on the medical record and Jeudy's documented functional limitations to counter the insurer's position that the absence of surgery undercut his damages.
The case resolved in a settlement of $337,433. The figure accounts for both the injuries Jeudy had already suffered and the likelihood that surgical intervention remained in his future, a forward-looking damages theory that the insurer ultimately accepted rather than litigate.
The settlement was reported in the Connecticut Law Tribune on March 4, 2025.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Carter Mario Injury Lawyers
All Carter Mario Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →A pavement-marking crew member fell from a moving trailer and struck his head on the road after a co-worker changed lanes abruptly, leaving him with no memory of the incident; Carter Mario resolved the combined workers' compensation and third-party auto claims for $3 million.
Carter Mario recovered $1.25 million for pedestrian Deborah Okolovitch after a driver exiting a parking lot struck her, with defense counsel contesting liability because she was not in a marked crosswalk.
Michael Lemieux was riding his motorcycle in Milford when a car driven by Weihua Niu hit him head-on, fracturing his left leg, injuring his right arm, and causing a hernia; Carter Mario Injury Lawyers demanded the full policy limit from the outset and obtained a $1.25 million settlement.
A U.S. District Court jury in Connecticut returned an $850,000 verdict for a sole-proprietor owner-operator trucker who was struck while parked on an exit ramp when a second rig rolled backward into him, more than four times the defense's final offer.
Related car accident verdicts
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A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
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.