State of Michigan Pays $7.7 Million to Settle Fatal Flint Police Chase Death Suit
After trial: Settled with the State of Michigan, so there was no verdict and no appeal. The State Senate voted 30 to 5 on October 1, 2015, to fund the settlement, and the bill then went to the House.
Jacqueline Nichols was killed on July 3, 2014, when a Michigan State Police cruiser pursuing a driver for a seatbelt violation ran a blinking red light and broadsided the car she was riding in. Her family sued the State Police. In October 2015 the state agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle the case, and the State Senate voted 30 to 5 to authorize the spending needed to fund it.
What happened
Jacqueline Nichols, who was in her sixties, died on July 3, 2014, as a passenger in a car on Flint's north side. A Michigan State Police cruiser struck it at the intersection of Pierson Road and North Street. Two other people in the car, Precious Cochran and Robbie Head, were also injured.
The cruiser was driven by Trooper Timothy Fagin, who had begun chasing another vehicle because its driver was not wearing a seatbelt. The dashcam video from his cruiser showed two stop signs and two blinking red lights at the intersection. Fagin entered it at roughly 55 mph without stopping or braking, and broadsided the car Nichols was in.
Nichols' family sued the State Police. Their attorney, Christian Collis of the Southfield firm Fieger Law, argued that the trooper had too little time to see whether the intersection was clear, that he was unfamiliar with the area, and that he did not keep his siren on during the pursuit. Geoffrey Fieger, speaking for the family in July 2014, called the trooper's conduct 'totally inappropriate' and said he hoped the trooper would be disciplined. The State Police answered that others shared the blame, pointing to the City of Flint over the intersection, to the driver of the car Nichols was riding in, and to the driver of the car being chased.
Court records added another problem for the defense. The trooper's own attorneys admitted that he broke State Police chase policy, because his father was riding along that day and had not signed the required liability waiver. The State Police confirmed that Fagin was disciplined for the crash. The two people in the pursued car were later charged with felonies connected to the chase and collision.
The case ended without a trial. In October 2015 the state agreed to pay $7.7 million. The State Police said the state's liability fund covered only a small part of that, so the Legislature had to approve additional spending. The Senate voted 30 to 5 on October 1, 2015, to amend the budget for that purpose, and the funding bill then went to the House. In a statement the State Police said it regretted the tragic outcome and hoped the settlement would provide some restitution to the families involved.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.The Flint Journal / MLive, 'State to pay $7.7M to settle fatal police chase lawsuit', Oct. 2, 2015·Archived copy
- 2.NBC25 Mid-Michigan Now, 'Michigan State Police blame City of Flint and others for fatal trooper chase', Aug. 29, 2014·Archived copy
- 3.CBS Detroit, 'Two Charged In Fatal Crash Involving State Trooper'·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Fieger, Fieger, Kenney & Harrington, P.C.
All Fieger, Fieger, Kenney & Harrington, P.C. proven verdicts →After spinal surgery at the Detroit Medical Center's Children's Hospital of Michigan left a 10-year-old girl partially paralyzed and permanently incontinent, and her surgeon took two vacations before the hardware came out, a Wayne County jury awarded $135 million.
Geoffrey Fieger and Jack Beam won the largest birth-injury verdict in Cook County history against the University of Chicago Medical Center, after a mother in fetal distress was left without an obstetrician for hours before an emergency cesarean.
A Wayne County jury found the Detroit Medical Center liable for the death of 26-year-old Terrea Holly, whose pulmonary embolism was treated as a virus and sent home from the emergency room.
An Oakland County jury found Warner Bros. and The Jenny Jones Show liable for the wrongful death of Scott Amedure and assessed $25 million, an award the Michigan Court of Appeals later reversed.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.