Sacramento Jury Awards $32.16 Million to Children of Man Killed by Off-Duty Police Detective on I-5
A Sacramento County jury awarded $32.16 million to the two young children of Juan Carlos Rodriguez after a City of Sacramento police detective drifted across the fog line on Interstate 5 and struck Rodriguez and his brother, killing both men.
What happened
In December 2022, Juan Carlos Rodriguez and his brother Lionel Enriquez Rodriguez, 33 and 32 years old respectively, were on the shoulder of Interstate 5 in Sacramento when Lionel's vehicle had broken down. Detective Jonathan Nangle of the Sacramento Police Department was driving an unmarked City vehicle on his way to work. He left his travel lane, crossed the fog line without lights or siren activated, and slammed into the brothers. Both men died at the scene.
Rodriguez left behind two children, ages six and ten at the time of the crash. Their mother, Jessica Romero, brought a wrongful death lawsuit on their behalf against the City of Sacramento. The City admitted liability for the motor vehicle accident, meaning trial focused on the measure of damages owed to the children for the loss of their father.
Attorneys John Demas and Tim Spangler of Demas Law Group, P.C. presented the jury with evidence that included testimony from three witnesses, 70 photographs, and 15 video clips, among them dashcam footage from a passing tanker truck that recorded the collision. The trial record made plain that Nangle had given no warning before striking the disabled vehicle.
The jury deliberated just over one hour before returning a unanimous verdict of $32.16 million. The award included $2.1 million in economic damages and $15 million per child for non-economic losses. John Demas stated at the time that the verdict was believed to be the largest wrongful death award the City of Sacramento had ever been required to pay, surpassing a prior $9.75 million settlement from 2017.
On the criminal side, Nangle faced two misdemeanor counts of vehicular manslaughter. A warrant was issued in September 2023 and he turned himself in. He later pleaded guilty to both counts and in February 2025 was sentenced to 120 days in jail, with the option to serve the time through community service. No reduction or remittitur of the civil verdict has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Fox40 Sacramento (KTXL): Jury awards $32.16M to children of father killed in crash involving police detective (April 28, 2026)·Archived copy
- 2.University of the Pacific Newsroom: Wrongful death lawsuit wins $32 million jury verdict (2026)·Archived copy
- 3.Abridged.org: Sacramento to pay $32.1 million in wrongful death lawsuit (2026)·Archived copy
- 4.ABC10 Sacramento: $32.1M verdict in Sacramento police crash case brings closure, family says (2026)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Demas Law Group, P.C., Personal Injury Attorneys
All Demas Law Group, P.C., Personal Injury Attorneys proven verdicts →A Sacramento family received a then-record $9.75 million civil settlement after a Sacramento police officer's department vehicle rear-ended their car at 63 mph on Interstate 80, fatally injuring 9-month-old Raiden Saechao.
Sacramento County paid $4 million to a teenager who had been imprisoned, starved, and beaten for seven years while CPS social workers repeatedly failed to act on at least ten documented abuse reports.
A Sacramento jury returned a $3,299,455 verdict for a motorist whose spinal injuries from a 2015 rear-end collision left him permanently disabled, despite the defense contesting both causation and the claimed damages.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.