For Decades She Washed Her Husband's Work Clothes, Caked in Dust From the Boilers Foster Wheeler Kept Stripping and Re-Insulating With Asbestos. The Jury Gave Her Nothing for Pain. The Judge Fixed That.
After trial: The figure that stood is $2,250,000, and it is lower than the $4,500,000 in damages because of Louisiana's pre-1996 virile-share rule, not because any court cut the damages. The jury's award was revised on JNOV to $3,000,000 general damages, $500,000 past medicals and $1,000,000 future medicals, and judgment was rendered against Foster Wheeler for one-half of that total, the other half being the virile share of non-party Olin Corporation. The Second Circuit affirmed on May 22, 2019 (Berry v. Anco Insulations, No. 52,671-CA), upholding the JNOV, the $1,000,000 future-medical award and the refusal to expand virile-share credits, with all costs to Foster Wheeler. Collectability: no source reports payment, so the disclosure stays at not public.
Won by Dean Omar Branham Shirley, LLP.
William Berry worked at the West Monroe Paper Mill from 1961 to 2010. Foster Wheeler installed the mill's two five-story boilers in the mid-1960s, sheathed in asbestos, and came back every year to strip and reinstall that asbestos in what he described as a dust storm. He wore his work clothes home; his wife Lynda washed them daily for decades. In 2015, at 65, she was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma. An Ouachita Parish jury awarded medical expenses but nothing for her suffering; the judge added $3,000,000 in general damages on JNOV. The judgment against Foster Wheeler, one-half virile share of $4,500,000, was $2,250,000, affirmed in 2019.
What happened
William Berry worked at the West Monroe Paper Mill from 1961 until he retired in 2010, as an electrical and instrumentation technician. In the mid-1960s the mill hired Foster Wheeler, an engineering and construction contractor, to install two boilers roughly five stories tall to generate power. They were covered in insulation panels and custom-fitted insulating cement, all of it asbestos. Every year the boilers went on a one-to-two-week outage for inspection and repair, and Foster Wheeler stripped the asbestos off and put it back. Berry described the work as spawning a dust storm inside the building. Foster Wheeler was still doing it when he retired.
He wore his work clothes home every evening. They came home caked with dust and dirt, and his wife Lynda washed, dried and folded them daily, for decades.
In early 2015 she began having stabbing pains in her stomach. In March 2015, at 65, she was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a cancer of the abdominal lining, which her doctors ascribed to the asbestos fibers on her husband's clothes. It caused a bowel obstruction that required surgery.
She sued 26 defendants in August 2015 in the Fourth Judicial District Court in Ouachita Parish. Because most of her exposure predated 1980, the court applied Louisiana's pre-comparative-fault law: each defendant found at fault would owe a virile share of the whole. By the time the jury retired after a six-day trial before Judge James H. Boddie Jr., sitting ad hoc, Foster Wheeler was the only defendant left in the case.
The jury found Foster Wheeler's asbestos a substantial factor in her disease and its products unreasonably dangerous for failure to warn, and found Olin Corporation, the mill's former owner and not a party, negligent as well. It awarded her medical expenses and nothing at all for physical pain, mental anguish or loss of enjoyment of life. The court entered judgment for $1,500,000, Foster Wheeler's one-half share after Olin's.
Both sides moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. The court granted hers, awarding $3,000,000 in general damages the jury had, in the appellate court's word, inexplicably denied; granted Foster Wheeler's in part, reducing past medicals to $500,000 and future medicals to $1,000,000; and refused Foster Wheeler's request to assign virile shares to defendants that had settled or been exonerated. Final judgment against Foster Wheeler: $2,250,000, one-half of $4,500,000.
Foster Wheeler appealed on five grounds. On May 22, 2019 the Louisiana Second Circuit affirmed in full, with costs to Foster Wheeler.
Lisa White Shirley of Dean, Omar, Branham, Shirley represented Lynda Berry, with Jody E. Anderman of Waddell Anderman.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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All Dean Omar Branham Shirley, LLP proven verdicts →On October 6, 2025, a Los Angeles County jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $966 million to the family of Mae K. Moore, a mother of three who died of mesothelioma in December 2021 at age 88 after decades of using the company's talc-based Baby Powder and Shower to Shower. The award comprised $16 million in compensatory damages and $950 million in punitive damages, reported at the time as the largest talc-mesothelioma verdict ever returned against Johnson & Johnson. The honest frame: on March 13, 2026, the trial judge, Ruth Ann Kwan, vacated the entire $950 million punitive award, finding the malice showing insufficient, while leaving the $16 million compensatory judgment intact. Both sides have said they will appeal. Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the case for the Moore family, and this page documents it as part of the public record.
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