Cory Watson Secures $25 Million Verdict Against Nissan Over Infiniti Brake Defect

In August 2012, a 2004 Infiniti QX56 sped through a Hollywood intersection and struck a vehicle carrying a mother and her two daughters. All three were killed. The SUV's driver, Solomon Mathenge, said his brakes had failed without warning. He was initially blamed for the wreck and faced a manslaughter charge, a charge that hinged on the assumption that the brakes had worked.

Cory Watson Attorneys, working with co-counsel, built the civil case around a single electronic part: the delta stroke sensor that fed braking data to the QX56's control unit. The plaintiffs argued the sensor could throw false fault codes, quietly switch the brakes into a backup hydraulic mode, and leave a driver unable to stop in a safe distance, or at all. Similar reports of sudden braking loss had surfaced across Nissan Titan, Armada, and QX56 models from the mid-2000s, and an earlier federal class action had already raised the same failure.

At trial in the Superior Court of California for Los Angeles County (Cruz v. Nissan North America, case BC493949), the firm's lawyers, including F. Jerome Tapley, Hirlye Ryan Lutz, and Brett Turnbull, told jurors that Nissan knew about the danger and should have recalled the affected vehicles. Nissan denied any defect and argued that Mathenge had pressed the gas instead of the brake.

The trial opened on June 26, 2017. The plaintiffs asked for roughly $231 million. After several weeks of testimony, the jury returned a 10-2 verdict in late July, finding the braking defect 100 percent responsible for the collision and Nissan negligent for failing to recall the vehicles. The award came in far below the roughly $231 million the plaintiffs had requested, but it placed the blame squarely on the manufacturer. The panel awarded $25 million: $14 million to the father of the two girls who died, $7.4 million to a surviving daughter, and $3.5 million to Mathenge, the SUV's owner. Jurors declined to add punitive damages.

Nissan appealed. In February 2019, the California Court of Appeal upheld the award in full, ruling that there was "substantial evidence to support the jury's findings on causation" and that the failure-to-recall claim was not preempted by federal law. The California Supreme Court later denied Nissan's petition for review, making the $25 million judgment final.