$21 Million Settlement for Pedestrian Who Lost Both Legs to Hit-and-Run Tractor-Trailer in Cobb County
Won by Fried Goldberg LLC.
A pedestrian walking home from work in Cobb County lost both legs after a tractor-trailer struck and dragged him through an intersection and fled the scene; Fried Goldberg identified the unknown driver and carrier and secured a $21 million settlement.
What happened
In 2022, Kirk Allen was walking home from work in Cobb County, Georgia, when a tractor-trailer plowed into him at an intersection, dragged him, and kept moving without stopping. No witnesses captured the truck's markings. Police classified the incident as a hit-and-run and closed out the report without identifying a driver or carrier. Allen survived, but both of his legs required amputation.
With no named defendant and no witness list, the path to any recovery was far from clear, and several attorneys turned the matter down. Attorneys Joseph Fried and Briant Mildenhall of Fried Goldberg LLC took the case alongside co-counsel Richard Samms and launched an investigation. They confirmed that Allen had the proper traffic signal and the legal right of way in the crosswalk at the time of impact. That finding shaped the liability theory, but the team still had to identify who was actually behind the wheel.
Through accident reconstruction and carrier record work, the firm tracked the truck to driver Glenn Scott and the companies he was operating under: Grammer Industries and Grammer Logistics. Great West Casualty Company was the insurer. Once the responsible parties were identified and the evidence assembled, the defendants no longer had a viable defense on liability.
The case settled in early 2023 for $21 million. The title of the Law.com Daily Report story on the settlement, published March 6, 2023, quoted Joseph Fried directly: 'In the end, they did the right thing.' No appeal or post-settlement reduction has been reported.
The result stands as one of the larger pedestrian-versus-truck settlements recorded in Georgia in recent years and illustrates the investigative work required when a carrier flees a catastrophic scene.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.