Gallagher & Kennedy Wins $17 Million Verdict Against GM Over a Deadly Park-to-Reverse Defect

On April 17, 1997, Ruth Golonka pulled her 1987 GMC Sierra pickup to the curb outside a neighbor's home in Scottsdale to load chairs into the bed. She moved the shifter toward "park," stepped to the back of the truck, and dropped the tailgate. The transmission slipped into reverse. The truck rolled backward and pinned her, and she died at the scene. She was 67.

Golonka's husband, Eugene, and her five adult children brought a wrongful death suit against General Motors in Maricopa County Superior Court. They retained Robert Boatman of Gallagher & Kennedy, who tried the case with Shannon Clark and co-counsel from his firm. The family pursued two ideas in tandem: that the truck's transmission was prone to slipping from "park" into "reverse," and that GM failed to warn drivers about that hazard.

Boatman's team built the case on GM's own paperwork. Internal records showed the company had logged more than 2,000 "park-to-reverse" complaints across its vehicles, and that over 200 of those reports involved injuries or deaths. The plaintiffs argued GM understood the pattern and chose not to redesign the part or alert owners. They told jurors the company had directed its engineers not to spend more on safety precautions than federal regulations strictly required.

In December 1999, the jury found GM at fault. It cleared the company on the defective-design theory but held it liable for negligent failure to warn and for a strict-liability information defect, assigning 60 percent of the fault to GM on the negligence count. Jurors awarded $7 million in compensatory damages plus $10 million in punitive damages, a $17 million judgment.

GM appealed. On April 1, 2003, the Arizona Court of Appeals agreed those two warning-based claims could properly go to a jury, and it upheld the trial court's refusal to give GM a state-of-the-art defense instruction on its written warnings. The panel found one instruction flawed: the judge had told jurors to apply a "heeding presumption," which assumes a person would have followed an adequate warning had one been given. The court held that instruction misstated how the presumption operates and prejudiced GM's rights. It reversed the judgment and remanded for a new trial on the failure-to-warn and information-defect claims. The opinion is reported at 204 Ariz. 575.