$9 Million Settlement for Truck Driver Who Lost His Right Leg When a Wheelabrator Truck Ran a Stop Sign
After trial: The case settled during trial, so there was no verdict and no appeal. The terms beyond the $9 million figure, and whether the defendant's insurers paid it, were not reported.
Won by Emroch & Kilduff.
A truck driver and furniture mover was hit on U.S. Route 17 in Fauquier County, Virginia, on July 21, 2000, by a Wheelabrator Water Technologies truck that pulled out from a stop sign. He broke both legs, and an infection that would not heal led to amputation of the right leg above the knee. Liability was admitted from the start. The case settled for $9 million after one day of jury trial in Richmond Circuit Court.
What happened
On July 21, 2000, a truck belonging to Wheelabrator Water Technologies Inc. was traveling on State Route 644 in Fauquier County, Virginia, when it came to a stop sign at U.S. Route 17. Mr. Gills was driving north on Route 17 at the time. The Wheelabrator driver did not come to a proper stop and pulled out into his path. Mr. Gills and a passenger in his vehicle were both hurt in the collision.
The crash broke the tibia and fibula in both of Mr. Gills's legs. He was flown by helicopter to Inova Fairfax Hospital. His right leg did not heal. He developed an antibiotic-resistant infection in that leg that kept the bone and tissue from healing, and the leg was eventually amputated above the knee.
Before the crash Mr. Gills had worked as a truck driver and as a furniture mover for Wynn Residential Suites. After the amputation he walked with a prosthesis and a cane, and he could no longer do either job. A vocational expert testified that he was now limited to sedentary work and that his hourly earning capacity had fallen by more than 40 percent.
Liability was never in dispute. Wheelabrator admitted from the beginning of the case that its driver caused the crash, which left the trial to decide only the value of the loss. The defense planned to argue that Mr. Gills's diabetes would shorten his life expectancy, which would reduce the value of his future losses, and that he was more employable than the plaintiff's vocational expert had concluded.
Walter H. Emroch, with co-counsel Thomas J. McNally, represented Mr. Gills. David W. Hearn and C. Randy Wimbish, both of Richmond, defended the company, which has since been renamed Synagrow WWT Inc. The case was tried to a jury in Richmond Circuit Court before Judge Randall G. Johnson.
The trial did not run its course. After one day of testimony, the parties settled for $9 million. Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported the result in a June 17, 2002 article. Because the case ended in a settlement during trial, there was no jury verdict for either side to challenge and no appeal followed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Emroch & Kilduff
All Emroch & Kilduff proven verdicts →A 55-year-old Virginia woman sitting in a chair was struck in the torso by a piece of equipment that was inadequately secured and maintained, and she died of a perforated heart. Her family brought a wrongful death claim against the company that owned the equipment. The case resolved at mediation before retired judge Michael Allen in June 2017 for $2.5 million. The defendant and the court were not identified in the published report.
An 80-year-old woman attending a funeral reception fell down non-uniform exterior stairs at a private club, sustaining a traumatic brain injury, skull and facial fractures, and a shoulder fracture, and settled for $2.3 million in July 2024.
A worker for a Virginia company fell about 14 feet through a roof opening in Maryland that was covered by a fiberglass panel painted to match the metal roof, landing on concrete. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, spinal, facial and skull fractures and a wrist fracture. The case was disputed on contributory negligence and on the extent of his cognitive impairment, and it settled at mediation for $2.25 million.
A 55-year-old woman had a small bowel perforated during a laparoscopic gallbladder removal, and the injury was not diagnosed for eight days. She needed multiple repair operations and a temporary ostomy, and she was left with short gut syndrome. The surgeons contested causation, citing pre-existing bowel problems. The claim settled at mediation for $1.65 million in 2017.
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.