$10.58 Million Verdict for Man Left Unable to Speak or Eat After Miami Intersection Crash
Won by Goldberg & Rosen.
A Miami-Dade jury awarded $10,577,853.93 to plaintiff David Brown after a 2015 T-bone collision left him with a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, and two years during which he could not speak, eat, or drink.
What happened
Shortly after 5:30 a.m. on February 25, 2015, David Brown was driving his 2012 Honda CR-V through the intersection of Southwest 88th Street and Southwest 117th Avenue in Miami on his way to the first day of a new job as an electrician's assistant. Marisol Lugardo-Soto's vehicle struck his broadside. The impact spun the CR-V and rolled it.
Brown suffered a traumatic brain injury and a stroke. Medical teams placed him in a medically induced coma and performed a tracheotomy to support his breathing. For the next two years he could not speak, eat, or drink on his own. His co-plaintiff, Tania Jenkins, joined the suit as well.
Brett Rosen, Judd Rosen, and Zachary Bodenheimer of Goldberg & Rosen filed the negligence action on April 17, 2015. At trial before Circuit Judge Peter Lopez, Brett Rosen pointed to a telling physical detail: Lugardo-Soto's driver-side sun visor was in the down position at the time of the crash. Rosen pressed the inference in closing, noting that she had already admitted Brown's vehicle came from Southwest 117th Avenue, directly contradicting any claim she had a clear view of the road.
The defense, represented by Daniel Martinez and Ben Thomas of Martinez Denbo, argued that Brown was confused about his lane position and his destination, and that his own conduct caused the collision. The jury disagreed on liability but found Brown 49 percent comparatively at fault.
On December 6, 2018, the jury returned a gross verdict of $10,577,853.93. After applying the 49 percent comparative-fault reduction, Brown's net recovery came to approximately $5.4 million. The result ranked fifth on the list of Top 50 Car Accident Verdicts in Florida for 2018.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Goldberg & Rosen
All Goldberg & Rosen proven verdicts →The families of 98 people killed in the June 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida, recovered over $1 billion through a class settlement run by a court-appointed Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, with final approval reached in under a year.
Goldberg & Rosen attorneys Judd and Brett Rosen secured a $35 million jury verdict against drunk driver Thomas Cypress, whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit when he killed retired Maryland couple Robert and Paulette Kirkpatrick on Tamiami Trail in 2009, producing what was at the time the largest damages award for surviving adult children in Florida history.
Goldberg and Rosen secured a $13 million jury verdict on behalf of a man left near death after a nightclub bouncer's felony battery, but a Miami judge vacated the award in 2024 and ordered a new trial after finding the defendants were wrongly barred from presenting certain defenses.
A Miami jury awarded $5.2 million to the estate of cyclist Miguel Del Angel Ortiz, killed in a 2022 truck collision, after Goldberg and Rosen attorneys rejected a $80,000 settlement and proved the driver was distracted on a phone call.
Related car accident verdicts
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An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.