$21 Million Verdict for Pedestrian Struck in Sumner Crosswalk, Followed by Driver's Bankruptcy
After trial: Collection is the real story: the defendant carried only $25,000 of liability coverage and filed Chapter 7. The resulting bad-faith and malpractice litigation against her insurer was partly dismissed and partly revived by Division II in October 2025, and a petition for review was still unresolved in 2026.
Won by Dearie Law Group, P.S..
A Pierce County jury awarded Cristina Anderson $21 million in August 2023 after she was struck in a downtown Sumner crosswalk and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The driver carried $25,000 in liability coverage and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after the verdict, and the fight over who pays the rest is still in the courts.
What happened
On December 7, 2019, Cristina Anderson was crossing a street in downtown Sumner, Washington, when a car driven by Wendy Gibson hit her. Anderson suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Anderson sued Gibson and the City of Sumner in Pierce County Superior Court. Gibson was insured by Farmers Insurance Company of Washington and Mid-Century Insurance, which assigned a defense lawyer to represent her. Her policy carried $25,000 in liability protection.
Anderson settled with the City of Sumner shortly before trial. The case against Gibson went to a jury, and in August 2023 that jury returned a verdict of $21 million.
What happened next is the part that matters most to anyone reading this number. Gibson filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The bankruptcy trustee took control of every legal claim Gibson personally held, including any claims against her own insurer and against the lawyer Farmers had assigned to defend her. With the bankruptcy court's approval and after notice to Gibson's other creditors, the trustee sold those claims to Anderson. The bankruptcy stay lifted in March 2024.
Anderson then amended her complaint to go after the insurers directly. Represented by Raymond Dearie of Dearie Law Group, she brought claims for declaratory relief, garnishment, breach of contract, insurance bad faith, and violations of Washington's Consumer Protection Act and Insurance Fair Conduct Act. Her theory was that Farmers had refused to negotiate in good faith, had declined to blame or cross claim against the City of Sumner, and had put its own costs ahead of the financial exposure of the person it was supposed to be protecting.
Farmers moved to dismiss under CR 12(b)(6). It argued that Washington law, under Kommavongsa v. Haskell, forbids assigning a legal malpractice claim to the opposing party in the very litigation that produced it. The trial court dismissed Anderson's entire complaint.
On October 21, 2025, Division II of the Washington Court of Appeals issued a published opinion that split the difference. It held that the bar on assigning legal malpractice claims does apply even when the transfer happens involuntarily through a bankruptcy sale, so the claims rooted in the defense lawyer's alleged malpractice stay dismissed. But it reversed on everything else. The acquired claims that were not malpractice claims, and Anderson's own independent claims against Farmers, were wrongly thrown out. The court also rejected Farmers' argument that Gibson's bankruptcy discharge meant she suffered no harm. The case went back to the trial court, and the appeals court awarded costs to neither side.
Anderson petitioned the Washington Supreme Court for review of the malpractice ruling on December 30, 2025. Farmers filed its answer on February 13, 2026.
The $21 million judgment against Wendy Gibson exists. Whether any meaningful portion of it is ever collected depends on litigation that has not finished. Against the driver herself, the recoverable insurance was $25,000.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Washington Court of Appeals, Division II·Archived copy
- 2.Petition for Review to the Washington Supreme Court, No. 104916-1 (filed December 30, 2025)·Archived copy
- 3.Insurance Business America: Washington court slams Farmers Insurance over $21 million verdict fallout·Archived copy
- 4.Dearie Law Group, P.S. (firm)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Dearie Law Group, P.S.
All Dearie Law Group, P.S. proven verdicts →A Pierce County jury awarded $130 million against the State of Washington and a South Hill daycare over the death of a 2-year-old girl who died of blunt force trauma in March 2022 after the state's child welfare agency returned her to a home where her abuser remained present and daycare staff failed to report visible injuries they had seen. After a five-week trial the jury found the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families 90% at fault and Love and Laughter Learning Centers, Inc. 10% at fault. Of that total, $52 million was awarded individually to the girl's estate, with the remainder split among four other family beneficiaries, and the jury returned a further $10 million against the mother and her boyfriend. News accounts described it as the largest verdict of its kind in Washington state history. Ray Dearie of Dearie Law Group represented the family.
A King County jury awarded Lesley Mettler Auld $13.1 million after she slipped on an algae-covered Seattle sidewalk in July 2021 and ruptured both quadriceps tendons. Jurors found both the City of Seattle and 14th & Dravus LLC, the owner of the adjacent apartment building, negligent, and split the fault 52 percent to the property owner and 48 percent to the city over an overgrown hedge that shaded the walkway and the moss and algae that grew under it. Auld, a longtime personal trainer and 14-time Ironman finisher, had three surgeries to repair the tendons, and her examining physicians said she would need at least three more operations on her right knee and could lose the right leg above the knee if those failed. The Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in March 2026, and 14th & Dravus has since asked the state Supreme Court to take up the case.
A Snohomish County jury awarded $3 million to a woman who was sexually abused for years starting at age 13 by a Monroe police sergeant she met through the DARE program at her school. The jury found the state's child welfare agency negligent because one of its Child Protective Services investigators, a mandatory reporter who was close to the sergeant, suspected the abuse and never reported it. The same jury found the Monroe School District was not negligent. The verdict came on November 2, 2023, and judgment was entered later that month. The state appealed to Division One of the Washington Court of Appeals, and the woman separately asked the trial court to vacate the judgment and order a new trial over a recording she says the state failed to produce in discovery.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
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.