Jury Awards $190 Million After View Homes VP Killed Two in Drunk-Driving Crash Near Chaparral
A Santa Fe jury awarded $190 million to the families of two young people killed and three others seriously injured when an intoxicated View Homes Inc. executive crossed the center line on Highway 213 near Chaparral, New Mexico, on January 17, 2023.
What happened
On January 17, 2023, Patrick James Woods was driving a company vehicle on Highway 213 near Chaparral, New Mexico. Woods served as vice president and director of land acquisition for View Homes Inc. and was traveling between company job sites that afternoon. He crossed the center line at high speed, struck an oncoming car head-on, and his vehicle then went airborne and hit a third car. Woods left the scene on foot. Officers responding to the collision found an open bottle of Fireball whiskey in the vehicle he had been driving.
Jose Marrero, 20, and Desiree Seanez, 20, were in the car that took the first impact. Both were killed. Three other people across the crash sustained serious injuries. In October 2023, Woods pleaded guilty in criminal court to two counts of homicide by vehicle, leaving the scene of a crash causing great bodily injury, resisting and evading arrest, open container violations, and failure to report the accident. A judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.
The families of Marrero and Seanez, together with the injured survivors, retained Glasheen, Valles & Inderman Injury Lawyers. Attorneys Noe Valles and Laney Piercy pursued a civil suit against View Homes, arguing on two fronts. The first was that Woods was acting within the course and scope of his employment at the moment of the crash. The second was that View Homes Inc., the parent company, was his actual employer and could not insulate itself through its smaller SDC subsidiary. The plaintiffs also alleged that View Homes had worked to conceal the connection between Woods's movements that day and his company duties.
View Homes contested both points and used its subsidiary structure to argue that liability, if any, sat with the smaller entity rather than the parent. That argument defined the center of the trial.
The Santa Fe jury rejected it. Jurors found that Woods was acting in the course and scope of employment and that View Homes Inc. itself was his employer. Both findings were necessary to hold the parent company responsible for the full damages.
On April 22, 2025, the jury returned a verdict of $190 million for the families of Marrero and Seanez and for the injured survivors. The families and their attorneys announced the result at a press conference two days later, on April 24, 2025. No post-trial reduction or remittitur of that amount appears in public reporting.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KVIA ABC-7 El Paso: $190 million awarded in drunk driving case·Archived copy
- 2.KFOX TV 14 El Paso: Chaparral crash victims' families win $190M verdict against drunk driver's employer·Archived copy
- 3.KTSM 9 News via Yahoo News: Families of victims killed in Chaparral crash receive $190M·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Glasheen, Valles & Inderman Injury Lawyers
All Glasheen, Valles & Inderman Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →A Dallas County jury found developer Greystar liable for the 2019 tower crane collapse that killed 29-year-old Kiersten Smith in her apartment, returning an $860 million verdict that Jason and Cory Itkin helped win for her family. The trial court cut the $500 million exemplary award under the Texas statutory cap before signing judgment in August 2023, entering $360,012,006 in compensatory damages jointly and severally against the three Greystar entities plus prejudgment interest, and Greystar's appeal, argued in February 2026, is undecided.
An Ector County jury awarded $262.5 million to Isaac Sanchez, left quadriplegic when a drunk driver who had been served 19 drinks at Linx Bar and Grill rear-ended his motorcycle at a North Odessa intersection in June 2021.
Orlando Robles, 38, of El Paso, died in October 2020 when the Mesilla Valley Transportation tractor-trailer he was resting in struck a parked box truck on Interstate 40 in Oklahoma after the driver fell asleep. In July 2026 an El Paso jury found the carrier and its driver responsible and awarded $76.5 million to Robles' wife, mother and five daughters. A separate award went to his son through other counsel. The company has said it is evaluating appellate options.
Kevin Glasheen won a $60.5 million jury verdict in 1997, at the time the largest railroad accident verdict in Texas, after a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train killed a Friona family at a grade crossing in August 1993.
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.