Marine Veteran Paralyzed During a Bar Ejection Wins a Record $51.6 Million Kendall County Verdict, Later Reversed on Appeal

Late on the night of November 13, 2015, Logan Bland was drinking at Q Bar in Plano, Illinois, with his friend Kyle George. Bland, a Marine Corps veteran from Yorkville, was a regular there. As the night went on, bartenders cut him off, and he and George began fighting. Staff pulled them apart, and the manager kept Bland in her office while he cooled down. When he came back out, the fight started again. Four employees carried him toward the exit.

What happened at the door became the heart of the case. Bland's lawyers argued that in the course of forcing him out, staff flipped him over and his neck bent as he went down. Security footage captured the ejection. Imaging at Central DuPage Hospital showed the C6 and C7 vertebrae of his spine out of alignment, and surgery accomplished little. Bland was left a quadriplegic. He now uses a motorized wheelchair and relies on a full time caregiver.

Bland sued Q-West Inc., the bar's corporate owner, in Kendall County Circuit Court, case 15 L 94. Michael Cetina of Walsh, Knippen and Cetina handled the case from 2015 until his death in November 2020. John Power and Sara Davis of Cogan and Power then carried it through trial alongside Daniel Cetina.

After nearly two weeks of trial, the jury returned its verdict on June 30, 2021: $51.6 million in damages, with Bland found 20 percent at fault for his own injury. That reduced the net award to roughly $41 million. The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reported it as the largest verdict in Kendall County history.

The verdict did not survive appeal. On January 10, 2023, the Illinois Appellate Court, Second District, reversed and sent the case back for a new trial in Bland v. Q-West, Inc., 2023 IL App (2d) 210683. The panel found several errors. When Bland amended his complaint near the end of his case to add a claim over the physical handling itself, the trial court refused to let Q-West raise self defense in response. The trial court also declined to fully instruct the jury on Bland's contributory negligence, including evidence that he kicked at employees during the removal, and excluded expert discovery answers pointing to paramedics and emergency room physicians as a possible sole proximate cause of the injury. The opinion also criticized portions of the closing argument, including a makeshift dummy used as a prop.

The reversal wiped out the judgment and returned the case to Kendall County for retrial. No independent outlet has reported the outcome of the proceedings after remand. Cogan and Power's own site now lists the matter as a record setting $41 million recovery for a Marine Corps veteran paralyzed after bouncers forcibly removed him from a bar.