$219.9 Million Verdict for Paramedic Brain-Injured in Ambulance Crash
After trial: Remitted on appeal to roughly $84.1 million. The jury returned $219,910,110.82 on September 23, 2024, and in July 2026 the Louisiana Third Circuit affirmed liability but reduced general damages to $40,000,000 and future medicals to $41,300,219.
Won by Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys.
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.
What happened
At about seven in the evening on July 8, 2021, Sherri Tramble was working. She was 36, a paramedic with St. Landry Parish EMS, riding unrestrained in the back of a 2019 Ram ambulance on westbound LA 182 near I-49, starting an IV on a patient they were taking to Opelousas General Hospital. Being unrestrained is not carelessness in that job. It is how you treat someone in a moving ambulance.
Joshua Briscoe was driving a Chevrolet Silverado for his employer, Linetec Services, taking an electrical-line crew home from a job. He turned across the ambulance's path to reach the I-49 on-ramp without yielding. The ambulance T-boned him.
Tramble was thrown around the cabin and struck her head. She suffered a large scalp laceration, multiple skull fractures involving her eye socket, cheek and nose, a subdural bleed, a fracture of the C-7 vertebra, and a permanent traumatic brain injury. She was unconscious at the scene and barely breathing, with blood obstructing her airway.
She has since been interdicted, which is Louisiana's term for a court finding that a person can no longer manage their own affairs. The appeal in her case is captioned in her brother's name as her curator.
On September 23, 2024 the St. Landry Parish jury put 100 percent of the fault on Briscoe. It valued her noneconomic damages at $155,500,000 and her life care plan at $61,443,984, for a verdict of $219,910,110.82.
What happened on appeal is the part that matters for understanding Louisiana. Louisiana appellate courts review general damages de novo on the record, which means they can substitute their own number. In July 2026 the Third Circuit affirmed liability and every evidentiary ruling, then cut the general damages from $155,500,000 to $40,000,000, describing that as the highest amount the jury reasonably had within its discretion, and cut future medicals from $61,433,984 to $41,300,219.
Tramble was represented by Richard F. Zimmerman III, Justin R. Glenn, Misti L. Bryant and Brian C. Colomb of Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys, with A.M. Clayton and Michael P. Fruge of Clayton Fruge and Ward as co-counsel and The Dupre Law Firm on the appeal.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys
All Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys proven verdicts →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.
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 truck accident verdicts
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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.