Jury Awards $5.2 Million After Attorneys Reject $80,000 Offer in Cyclist's Wrongful Death
Won by Goldberg & Rosen.
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.
What happened
On the morning of February 15, 2022, Miguel Del Angel Ortiz, 50, was riding his bicycle on Dade Boulevard at the intersection of Purdy Avenue in Miami Beach when a box truck operated by Jairo Restrepo and owned by Performance Transportation LLC made a right turn and struck him. He died as a result of his injuries.
Miami Beach Police initially determined that Ortiz was at fault for failing to yield. The case might have ended there, but attorneys Judd Rosen and Mustafa Dandashly of Goldberg and Rosen took a different view of the evidence.
The trial team assembled multiple camera sources to reconstruct the collision. Dashcam footage from the delivery truck itself placed Ortiz in the rear-view mirror moments before impact. Store surveillance cameras and an Uber dashcam captured the crash and its immediate aftermath. The Uber footage included a passenger asking whether they should stop to help, followed by the reply that the man on the ground was not OK. Audio from the truck's dashcam showed Restrepo in the middle of a phone conversation in Spanish at the time he attempted the turn. Rosen argued that Restrepo had signaled late and simply was not paying attention.
Performance Transportation and Restrepo offered Ortiz's estate $80,000 to settle the case before trial. The family and their attorneys declined. After three days of deliberation, the jury assigned the majority of fault to Restrepo, with a smaller share to Ortiz, and returned total damages of $5.2 million.
The verdict was returned in January 2024. It was approximately 65 times the defendants' pretrial settlement offer.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Daily Business Review (Law.com): After Miami Attorneys Reject $80K Settlement, Jurors Award Their Client $5.2M Verdict (Jan. 22, 2024)·Archived copy
- 2.WSVN 7News: Attorney Announces $5.2M Judgment in Case of Cyclist Killed in 2022 Meat Truck Crash·Archived copy
- 3.The Florida Bar Daily News Summary: Jan. 23, 2024 (linking to Daily Business Review coverage)·Archived copy
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-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.
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.