Philadelphia Jury Awards $7 Million to Family of State Prosecutor Killed in I-78 Work-Zone Pileup
After trial: We found no appeal reported and no public information on payment. We could not confirm whether the 90/10 fault split changed the judgment entered on the Rosner award, so the ranked figure is the amount the jury returned.
Won by Feldman Shepherd Wohlgelernter Tanner Weinstock Dodig.
Robert Rosner, a Pennsylvania deputy attorney general, died in a five-vehicle pileup on I-78 in Berks County on May 12, 2014, in a work zone where traffic had backed up. In June 2021 a Philadelphia jury found the PennDOT contractor Bill Anskis Co. 90 percent liable for inadequate warnings about the project and awarded Rosner's family $7 million. A second family, who lost a husband and wife in the same crash, received $12.1 million in the consolidated trial.
What happened
On May 12, 2014, traffic on Interstate 78 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, had slowed and stacked up for roughly two and a half miles at a bridge rehabilitation project. Robert Rosner, a deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was stopped in that backup when a tractor-trailer struck his vehicle from behind. The impact pushed his car into a Jeep occupied by Ned and Theresa Dearden, a married couple, and the Jeep exploded. Rosner and both Deardens died. Five vehicles were involved.
The Rosner family sued, and the case was consolidated for a single trial in Philadelphia with the claims of the Dearden family, who were represented by Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky. John Dodig and Jason Daria of Feldman Shepherd represented the Rosner family. The defendants included Bill Anskis Co. Inc., the contractor PennDOT had hired for the bridge project, and the driver of the tractor-trailer.
The plaintiffs' case against the contractor centered on the work zone itself. They argued that Anskis had not put up adequate advance warnings about the project and the traffic it was creating, and that nobody was watching the backup to alert drivers approaching it at highway speed. Their position was that the company had days to plan for the congestion its work would cause and did not. In closing, co-counsel David Kwass put the contrast this way: the truck driver had 24 seconds to slow down, and the contractor had five days to think through a better plan. The defense was handled by Bardsley, Benedict + Cholden and by Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin.
The case went to Judge James Crumlish and a Philadelphia jury, and the trial ran five days. The truck driver settled before trial, but the jury was still asked to assign him a share of fault. It put 90 percent of the responsibility on Bill Anskis Co. and 10 percent on the driver.
The verdict was announced on June 25, 2021. The jury awarded $7 million to Robert Rosner's family and $12.1 million to the family of Ned and Theresa Dearden, for a combined $19.1 million. The Legal Intelligencer later ranked it the largest verdict in Pennsylvania for 2021.
We found no report of an appeal in news coverage or in the court records we could search, and we could not confirm whether the 90 percent finding changed the final judgment entered on the Rosner award.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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