$17 Million Verdict for Driver Hit by Dump Truck Merging Onto a 65 mph Highway Around a Road Grader
After trial: No Arkansas appellate opinion, remittitur, new trial or appeal has been reported. The contractor is still operating, but the exact resolution and payment are not public.
Won by Duncan Firm, P.A..
Ariel Anderson, 23, was driving home from work on U.S. 67/167 near Jacksonville when a highway contractor's dump truck merged into her lane at about 30 mph. It had entered at an angle to get around a road grader, so neither driver could see the other. The jury found the contractor had not posted the warning signs the project required.
What happened
In July 2008 Ariel Anderson, 23, of Cabot was driving home from her job at a Little Rock restaurant along U.S. 67/167, between Redmond Road and the Arkansas 440 overpass near Jacksonville. The posted speed in her lane was 65 miles per hour.
Weaver-Bailey Contractors, of El Paso, Arkansas, was widening the highway between Jacksonville and Sherwood. One of its dump trucks needed to get onto the highway and had to enter at an angle in order to get around a road grader. That angle is the fact the case turned on: it meant the truck driver could not see Anderson and Anderson could not see the truck. The truck merged at roughly 30 miles per hour into a 65 mile per hour lane and struck her.
The failure the jury found was not the merge itself. It was that Weaver-Bailey had not posted the warning signs appropriate to the project, and so had not exercised reasonable care for the drivers using a highway it was working on. A driver doing 65 in an unmarked lane has no way to anticipate a truck entering sideways.
After a two-week trial before Judge Sandy Huckabee, the Lonoke County jury returned $17,000,000 on Friday, June 3, 2011, on a 10 to 2 majority.
Anderson was represented by Phillip J. Duncan of the Duncan Law Firm, now the Duncan Firm, in Little Rock, with Jerry Kelly of Lonoke as co-counsel.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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