$12.8 Million Verdict After Steel Coil Crushed a Delivery Driver at a Hopkinsville Auto Parts Plant
After trial: No appeal or post-trial resolution has been reported. Payment is not public.
A Christian County jury found Martinrea Hopkinsville, LLC and its crane operator responsible for the 2015 death of delivery driver Gregory Sean Engleman, crushed by a steel coil weighing more than 15,000 pounds, and awarded his family $12,802,165, reported as a record personal injury verdict for the county.
What happened
Gregory Sean Engleman, 46, drove trucks for a living. On October 26, 2015, a delivery brought him to the Martinrea Hopkinsville plant, an auto parts manufacturing facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, that receives large coils of steel for stamping into vehicle components. Moving those coils off a trailer and into the plant requires an overhead crane, operated from above by a plant employee who lifts and guides several tons of rolled steel through the air.
On this delivery, a coil of steel weighing more than 15,000 pounds came down on Engleman. He was killed at the scene. The crane at the time was being operated by Mark Acord, a Martinrea employee.
Engleman's family sued Martinrea Hopkinsville and Acord, arguing that the company had failed to properly train and supervise the employees responsible for moving steel coils around delivery drivers, and that Acord had not operated the crane the way a reasonably careful crane operator would have under the circumstances.
The case went to trial before Judge John Atkins in Christian Circuit Court. On April 16, 2018, the jury returned its verdict, apportioning fault 99.99 percent to Martinrea Hopkinsville and 0.01 percent to Acord individually. The total award came to $12,802,165: $7.5 million to Engleman's wife, Christine Engleman, for loss of companionship; $1.5 million each to his two sons for the same loss; $1 million to his estate for his pain and mental anguish before death; $1,293,105 to the estate for the destruction of his power to labor and earn money; and $9,060 in funeral and burial expenses.
Legal commentary covering the verdict noted that it exceeded what was believed to be the previous largest personal injury verdict in Christian County, an award of roughly $1.266 million, by a wide margin.
The family was represented by Dolt, Thompson, Shepherd, Conway & Stanton, PSC.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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