A Dump Truck Went Over an Interstate Bridge Rail and Burned. The State Had Built the Rail, and a Jury Made It Pay.
After trial: Affirmed. The First Circuit raised the co-employee driver's fault from 10 to 35 percent but, applying pre-1996 Louisiana comparative fault law (Gauthier v. O'Brien), reallocated that fault to DOTD, so the state remained liable for the full $9,352,826.67 to Snearl. The only reduction was to his mother's separate consortium award, cut from $300,000 to $125,000, which is not included in the ranked figure. Writs denied by the Louisiana Supreme Court, 01-1319 and 01-1320, June 22, 2001. DOTD's excess insurer tried to intervene on appeal, asserting exposure above the state's $1,000,000 self-insured retention; the intervention was dismissed as untimely. Whether and when the state paid is not public. The firm's own results page lists a $13,800,000 settlement for a bridge-rail double amputation, which may be this case with interest and costs, but nothing independent confirms that figure.
Won by Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys.
Jerrod Snearl, 22, was riding in the middle of the front seat of his employer's empty dump truck on the way to a tree-clearing job when the driver swerved on the I-12 overpass at Jefferson Highway in Baton Rouge, the brakes locked, and the truck rode up over the bridge rail and fell about 30 feet onto the bank of Ward's Creek, where it caught fire. The driver burned to death. Snearl, trapped with a broken pelvis, was burned over 51 percent of his body and lost both legs, his penis, a testicle and his spleen. An Iberville Parish jury found the state's bridge rail an unreasonable risk of harm and awarded him $9,352,826.67, which the First Circuit affirmed in 2001 while raising the driver's fault and reallocating it to the state.
What happened
Jerrod Snearl was 22 and working for Mercer Construction Services out of Brusly, Louisiana. On the morning of November 16, 1994, he, Dalton Olinde and the driver, Benny Frank, left around 6:30 in a company dump truck to clear trees at a job on Airline Highway. Snearl sat in the middle of the front seat.
As the unloaded truck approached the Interstate 12 overpass at Jefferson Highway in Baton Rouge, Frank suddenly swerved into the left lane. Because the bed was empty, the brakes locked and the truck rotated and skidded. When the brakes released, it careened into the bridge rail, slid along the top of it, and went over. It fell roughly 30 feet onto the bank of Ward's Creek, landed nose first, flipped, crushed the cab, and caught fire.
An LSU student on his way to class, Mark McInnis, dragged Olinde out. Snearl, pinned in the cab with a broken pelvis, could not be pulled free while the fire burned around him. Frank died in the fire beside him.
The rail was the case. The I-12 overpass barrier was a 10-inch curb in front of a parapet wall, topped by an aluminum handrail that was ornamental and provided no structural benefit. Snearl's lawyers argued the design let a vehicle ride up and over the wall instead of redirecting it, and that the Department of Transportation and Development should have known and fixed it.
Snearl's treating physician, Dr. Hargroder, described his burns as the deepest thermal burns he had ever seen. His lower legs were burned to exposed bone. The burns ran up into the groin and buttocks, with third- and fourth-degree burns to the genitals, and covered 51 percent of his body. Both legs were amputated below the buttock crease, too short for prostheses. He underwent a colostomy, a penectomy with urethrostomy, removal of the right testicle, and a splenectomy after his spleen ruptured. His entire back was used as a donor site for grafts. About two years after the crash, surgeons fashioned a new penis and urethra from the skin and muscle of his forearm, with only limited sensation. He was left in a wheelchair for life, with daily headaches, phantom pain and heat intolerance, and weighed 150 pounds at trial against 205 before the wreck.
The case was tried to a jury in Iberville Parish from October 5 to 14, 1998. By special interrogatories the jury found the bridge railing presented an unreasonable risk of harm, that DOTD should have known of it and had a reasonable opportunity to fix it, and that the defect was a proximate cause of the injuries. It put 90 percent of the fault on DOTD and 10 percent on Frank, and rejected the claim that a gold Volvo had cut Frank off. It awarded Snearl $475,104.67 in past medical expenses, $3,000,000 for future medical care and a life care plan, $41,698 in lost earnings, $536,074 in future earnings impairment, and $5,000,000 in general damages spread as $1,000,000 each for pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, permanent disability and permanent disfigurement: $9,352,826.67 in all. His mother, Ellouise Stewart, was awarded $300,000 for loss of consortium. Judgment was signed December 4, 1998.
Because Frank was a co-employee and immune from suit, the trial court reallocated his share to DOTD, making the state liable for the whole award. DOTD appealed. On February 16, 2001, the First Circuit held the jury was clearly wrong to give Frank only 10 percent and raised his fault to 35 percent, but ruled that under the law in force in 1994, before the 1996 amendments to Civil Code articles 2323 and 2324, an immune co-employee's fault is reallocated to the remaining culpable party rather than subtracted from the plaintiff's recovery. DOTD stayed liable for 100 percent. The court called the $5,000,000 in general damages high but not abusively so and affirmed every element of Snearl's award, reducing only Ms. Stewart's consortium award, to $125,000. The Louisiana Supreme Court denied writs on June 22, 2001.
Counsel of record for Snearl and his mother were Joseph J. McKernan and Kirby Guidry of Baton Rouge and Patrick Pendley of Plaquemine. Olinde, the other passenger, had separate counsel and a separate $1,110,244.38 award that is not part of this result.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Snearl v. Mercer, 780 So.2d 563 (La. App. 1 Cir. Feb. 16, 2001), Nos. 1999 CA 1738 and 1739: the counsel block naming Joseph J. McKernan, Kirby Guidry and Patrick Pendley for Snearl and Ellouise Stewart; the November 16, 1994 crash facts on the I-12 overpass at Jefferson Highway; the bridge rail design; the injuries; the Iberville Parish jury trial of October 5 to 14, 1998; the itemized $9,352,826.67 award; the December 4, 1998 judgment; the 90/10 fault split, the appellate increase of Frank's fault to 35 percent and the reallocation holding; the affirmance of the damages; and the reduction of the consortium award to $125,000
- 2.Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys (firm)
More proven verdicts from Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys
All Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys proven verdicts →Sherri Tramble, 36, was a St. Landry Parish paramedic riding unrestrained in the back of an ambulance, starting an IV on a patient en route to hospital, when a pickup turned across the ambulance's path without yielding. She has multiple skull fractures, a C-7 fracture and a permanent traumatic brain injury, and has since been interdicted.
On May 10, 1993, three high school students were coming home from school on Sullivan Road in East Baton Rouge Parish when the driver lost control in the Sparkle Drive curve on wet pavement, crossed the centerline and hit a pickup. The driver and one passenger died. The other passenger, 16-year-old Jason Adams, suffered a torn heart valve requiring open-heart surgery, permanent frontal lobe brain damage, a compound leg fracture, a crushed ankle and a fractured pelvis. A jury cleared the Parish, but the trial judge granted judgment notwithstanding the verdict because the Parish had skid tests and citizen complaints showing the road was dangerously slick and had not fixed it. The First Circuit affirmed liability, put 20 percent on the driver, and left the Adams family with $1,622,757.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and the honest frame is that it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
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 honest frame: 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.