$26.1 Million Settlement for I-80 Tractor-Trailer Death, Reported as Pennsylvania's Largest of Its Kind
Won by Feldman Shepherd Wohlgelernter Tanner Weinstock Dodig.
Feldman Shepherd secured a $26.1 million settlement for the family of a man killed and a husband left with a traumatic brain injury when a tractor-trailer hit stopped traffic on Interstate 80 at more than 70 mph.
What happened
On July 6, 2010, Kathryn Sneeringer was driving eastbound on Interstate 80 in central Pennsylvania with her father, David Cook, in the front passenger seat and her husband, Peter, in the rear. Traffic had stopped for road construction. Spencer Chapman, operating a tractor-trailer owned by GLC Transportation Inc. and hauling product for Great Lakes Cheese Co. of Ohio and Great Lakes Cheese of New York, struck the rear of the Sneeringers' 2004 Toyota Matrix at more than 70 miles per hour.
David Cook died in the collision. Peter Sneeringer survived but sustained a devastating traumatic brain injury that left him with permanent physical and cognitive deficits. Kathryn Sneeringer also suffered serious physical injuries.
Feldman Shepherd attorneys Alan M. Feldman, Daniel J. Mann, and Edward S. Goldis filed suit in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, naming GLC Transportation, Great Lakes Cheese Co. of Ohio, Great Lakes Cheese of New York, and Chapman as defendants. The plaintiffs contended the driver was inattentive or asleep at the wheel; Chapman claimed sun glare impaired his visibility.
The case went to mediation before James R. Melinson of JAMS. On June 5, 2012, the parties reached a settlement of $26.1 million, a figure that the Pennsylvania Record reported was believed to be the largest personal-injury settlement ever recorded in Pennsylvania at that time.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related truck accident verdicts
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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.