$38.8 Million Verdict Against Republic Services After Garbage Truck Killed 11-Year-Old in Crosswalk
Won by Claggett & Sykes Trial Lawyers.
A Clark County jury returned $38.8 million against Republic Services after one of its garbage trucks turned through a marked crosswalk and struck and killed an 11-year-old girl who was crossing with the walk signal.
What happened
On the morning of February 8, 2017, an 11-year-old girl was walking with a friend near the corner of South Sandhill Road and East Viking Road in Las Vegas. The two had the walk signal and the right of way. As they crossed, a Republic Services garbage truck driven by Julio Cortez-Solano turned right through the marked crosswalk without coming to a full stop. The truck struck the girl, and she died.
Her family sued Republic Silver State Disposal, the company that runs Republic Services routes in the Las Vegas area. The wrongful death case, filed in 2018 as A-18-782026-C, went to trial in Nevada's Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County before District Judge Jacqueline Bluth.
Sean Claggett and William Sykes of Claggett & Sykes tried the case over roughly two weeks in August 2021. Their theory was that Republic put a driver with a checkered safety record behind the wheel of the truck. They played video showing the truck rolling through the crosswalk instead of stopping, and they walked the jury through the driver's history, which included write-ups in the years before the crash and a firing followed by a rehire. Republic's lawyers argued the truck was already in the crosswalk when the girl stepped off the curb, and they suggested a figure of about $10.25 million plus funeral costs would be enough. The family asked the jury for $65 million.
The numbers had been far apart long before closing arguments. Republic first offered $250,000 to settle, then raised that to $1 million shortly before trial. On August 24, 2021, after more than a day of deliberation, the jury returned $38.8 million: $26 million for the family's past grief, sorrow, and loss of companionship, $12 million for future grief and loss, $750,000 for the child's own suffering, and $15,000 for funeral and related costs. The jury declined to award punitive damages.
The same verdict assigned 27 percent of the responsibility for the collision to the child. Under Nevada's comparative negligence rule, that finding cuts the family's recovery by roughly $10.5 million off the gross award.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Claggett & Sykes Trial Lawyers
All Claggett & Sykes Trial Lawyers proven verdicts →A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Rio Arriba County jury held Acadia Healthcare and its New Mexico foster care subsidiaries responsible for placing an 8-year-old girl with a foster father who raped her repeatedly, returning one of the largest single-plaintiff sexual abuse verdicts in the country.
A 20-year-old painter suffered a traumatic brain injury in a 2021 ladder fall in Utah. A Denver jury found his workers' compensation carrier, NorGUARD Insurance, knowingly and unreasonably delayed and denied his care, including inpatient rehabilitation. It awarded $145.26 million, made up of $85.26 million in compensatory and $60 million in punitive damages.
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.