$39 Million Verdict in I-40 Pileup That Killed Four
Won by Dollar, Burns, Becker & Hershewe.
A jury awarded nearly $39 million after a New Prime tractor-trailer jackknifed on icy Interstate 40 and triggered a multi-vehicle pileup that killed four people, including two members of a Texas family.
What happened
On the night of November 23, 2013, Sarah Gregory was hauling freight for New Prime, Inc. along Interstate 40 near the New Mexico-Texas state line. She spotted brake lights ahead, applied the brakes hard, and the eighteen-wheeler skidded on a patch of ice and jackknifed across the highway. The disabled trailer came to rest blocking traffic lanes in an unlit stretch of road, with no hazard warnings deployed.
The pile-up that followed pulled in additional tractor-trailers and passenger vehicles. Among those trapped in the chaos were members of an El Paso family riding together in a Chevy van. Belinda Vasquez and Hector Perales were killed; other relatives in the van, including van driver Guillermo Vasquez and Alma Perales, survived with serious injuries. Bhupinder Singh Deol, a truck driver who had pulled over, was struck and killed when the van was hit from behind and rolled over him. A fourth person, Tracy Jones, also died in the chain reaction.
The surviving family members and representatives of the deceased estates brought wrongful death and survival claims against Gregory and New Prime. Tim Dollar and JJ Burns of Dollar, Burns, Becker and Hershewe, L.C. tried the case for the Vasquez and Perales family, with Texas local counsel Mike Bassett. The jury found Gregory and New Prime jointly and severally liable, apportioning fifty-five percent of fault to Gregory and thirty percent to New Prime. The remaining fifteen percent fell on the driver of a third carrier involved in the chain of collisions.
The jury returned a verdict of approximately $38.8 million across all plaintiff families, with the Deol family alone receiving a judgment of $16,447,272.31 after settlement credits. The award included roughly $15 million in noneconomic damages covering past and future mental anguish and loss of companionship for six of Deol's family members.
The Dallas Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in November 2020, rejecting all twelve issues raised by Gregory and New Prime. The Texas Supreme Court, however, reversed and remanded for a new trial in 2023, holding that the noneconomic damages lacked a rational connection to the evidence at trial. The court singled out plaintiffs' counsel's closing argument, which urged jurors to award 'two cents for every mile' New Prime's fleet drove that year, and held that such unsubstantiated anchoring cannot support a damages figure. Gregory v. Chohan is now the leading Texas authority on how noneconomic damages must be proved.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Dollar, Burns, Becker & Hershewe
All Dollar, Burns, Becker & Hershewe proven verdicts →A Callaway County jury awarded Beth Mayhew and her husband $82.3 million after a truck driver hit their vehicle on I-70 while driving with both feet on the dashboard and holding an iPad to watch videos.
A Platte County jury returned a record $70 million verdict after an eight-year-old boy died and his six-year-old sister was seriously injured when a distracted driver rear-ended their grandparents' car in a highway construction zone.
A Jackson County jury awarded $40 million on Nov. 1, 2023, to the family of Charles Mabie, a 52-year-old man killed when a driver on PCP, traveling over 100 mph, struck his car from behind at a red light in Independence, Missouri. The defendant had admitted liability before trial, so the jury decided only damages. The award rested on the loss of Mabie's relationship with his wife and two children.
A Jackson County jury awarded $37.5 million to Steven Holdeman, who was left a paraplegic after a semi-truck rear-ended his car on Interstate 435, finding Philip Stratman 99 percent at fault for stalling his vehicle in the center lane.
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.