Sacramento County Jury Awards $17.2 Million in Morning Star Trucking Crash
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.
What happened
The crash happened early on the morning of September 26, 2016, on the eastbound side of Interstate 80 along the Yolo Causeway, the long bridge that carries the freeway between Davis and West Sacramento. Lethesia Guzman, then 27 and living in San Jose, was in a car that stalled in the right lane after a minor collision. She and her fiance got out and stood near the side of the road. A commercial truck hauling a load of tomatoes for the Morning Star companies struck the disabled car and pushed it into the middle lane. Another vehicle then hit the wreckage.
The two people standing beside the roadway were thrown over the side of the bridge and fell roughly 30 feet to the Yolo Bypass below. Guzman's fiance was pronounced dead at the scene. Guzman lived, but her injuries were catastrophic, and she was taken to UC Davis Medical Center. CBS Sacramento, reporting that morning, described "a deadly chain-reaction crash" that sent two people off the causeway and snarled the eastbound commute into Sacramento for hours.
Guzman sued Morning Star Company, Inc. and Morning Star Trucking Company, LLC in Sacramento County Superior Court, filing the case in February 2018. She was represented by Christopher Dolan of the Dolan Law Firm. The lawsuit named both the produce company and its trucking arm, which let the case reach the corporate decisions behind the driver rather than the driver alone. The claim did not rest only on the seconds before impact. It centered on how the companies hired, trained, and supervised the driver who was operating the loaded truck that night.
The trial lasted about ten weeks. Dolan's team argued that the Morning Star companies were responsible for putting the driver on the road and for the events that followed, and that their hiring, training, and supervision of the driver fell short of what the law requires. The jury found both Morning Star entities liable, and it assigned Guzman zero percent of the fault for what happened to her and her fiance.
In December 2024, the jury returned a verdict of $17,220,807 for Guzman. The award included punitive damages against the Morning Star companies, in addition to compensation for her injuries and the death of her fiance.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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