Alameda County Jury Returns $18.5 Million Verdict in Fresno Truck Crash
An Alameda County jury awarded $18,574,222 to Juanita Cerrato, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after she swerved to avoid a tractor-trailer left blocking her lane on a Fresno highway near midnight.
What happened
Just after midnight on October 24, 2019, Juanita Cerrato was driving on Jensen Avenue in Fresno, California, when a tractor-trailer loomed across her path. The rig, operated by Ye Wang for Yong's Logistics, sat blocking the shoulder and part of her lane, and its headlights were aimed back at oncoming traffic. The glare kept Cerrato from making out the obstruction until she was nearly on top of it. She swerved to avoid the trailer and crashed.
The wreck left Cerrato with a traumatic brain injury. Her condition was serious enough that, when the lawsuit was filed in February 2020, it had to be brought on her behalf through a guardian ad litem, Joseph Cerrato. The named defendants were Yong's Logistics, Inc., an Oakland-based carrier, and Wang, the driver who had stopped the trailer in the roadway.
Christopher Dolan of the San Francisco firm Dolan Law Firm took the case over from another firm well after the crash. The road to trial was steep. The claim fell under California's Proposition 213, which caps what certain drivers can recover, the police findings did not favor Cerrato, and the defense held unfavorable evidence about her that it planned to use at trial. Only a $1 million insurance policy was available, and the defense never put an offer on it.
The case reached an Alameda County jury in April 2025, and the trial ran about six weeks. Much of the fight happened before the jury weighed in. Dolan moved to keep the defense's experts off the stand, and the court excluded four of them and sharply cut back the testimony of three more. With that opinion evidence gone or narrowed, the firm argued that Wang and Yong's Logistics created the hazard themselves by leaving the trailer across the road with its lights blinding approaching drivers, then asked the jury to hold the company fully responsible for a crash it called preventable.
The jury agreed. On May 16, 2025, it returned a verdict of $18,574,222 for Cerrato against Yong's Logistics, more than eighteen times the $1 million policy the defense had declined to pay.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Dolan Law Firm, PC Personal Injury Lawyers
All Dolan Law Firm, PC Personal Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →Chris Dolan represented the surviving Tran family and reached a $36 million settlement with Alameda County after an off-duty deputy who had failed his psychological exam shot Maria and Benison Tran in their Dublin home.
A Sacramento County jury awarded $17,220,807 to Lethesia Guzman, whose car stalled on the Yolo Causeway before a Morning Star tomato truck set off the chain-reaction crash that killed her fiance and left her with catastrophic injuries.
A federal jury found that a City of Roy, Washington police officer used excessive force when he shot two unarmed men riding an off-road vehicle during a 2019 snowstorm, awarding $3.26 million.
Christopher Dolan secured a confidential settlement from Uber in what is widely described as the first wrongful-death suit filed against the company over a driver's conduct, after a New Year's Eve 2013 crosswalk collision in San Francisco killed a 6-year-old girl.
Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.