$2.7 Million Verdict After State Farm Fought an Uninsured-Motorist Claim, Driver Found 85% at Fault
Won by Greer Injury Lawyers.
After State Farm denied uninsured-motorist coverage and defended the driver who caused the crash, a Memphis jury held him 85 percent at fault for the collision that killed Kathryn Sadowski and injured her 90-year-old husband, Emil.
What happened
On March 11, 2012, Emil and Kathryn Sadowski were driving their Lexus on Highway 64 near the Wolfchase Galleria in east Memphis when a modified Subaru driven by Chamroerun Kheiv slammed into their car. Kheiv carried no auto insurance.
Emil, who was 90, spent nine days in the hospital and then moved to long-term care. His wife, Kathryn, suffered catastrophic injuries. She lingered about 60 days before she died from those injuries in May 2012.
The Sadowskis had bought uninsured-motorist coverage for a day like this one. State Farm Fire and Casualty had $2.5 million of that coverage in force when the crash happened. Rather than pay the claim, State Farm Mutual and State Farm Fire stepped in to defend the uninsured driver at trial. State Farm did not dispute that it had sold the coverage. It disputed that it owed anything, arguing that Emil, at 90, had caused the wreck and broke the law in doing so, and it made no offer to settle before the case reached a courtroom.
R. Sadler Bailey of Bailey & Greer, the Memphis firm now known as Greer Injury Lawyers, tried the case with Nashville co-counsel Donald Capparella. The trial took place before Judge Jerry Stokes in Shelby County Circuit Court, Division 6. The contest was over fault: State Farm blamed Emil, and Bailey argued that Kheiv caused the collision and that the coverage the Sadowskis had paid for should answer for it.
In late November 2013, the jury sided with the Sadowskis. It found Kheiv 85 percent at fault and Emil 15 percent at fault, and it set the total damages above $3 million. Under that allocation, roughly $2.7 million of the award fell on the uninsured driver's share, the portion the Sadowskis' policy was meant to cover.
Two things reduced the final number. The 15 percent of fault assigned to Emil came off the top, and a Tennessee statute that took effect in 2011 capped noneconomic damages, the pain-and-suffering part of the award, at $750,000. Together they brought the judgment to just over $2 million. When WREG examined the case in early 2014, State Farm still had not paid the family.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Greer Injury Lawyers
All Greer Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →A Shelby County jury found two Regional One obstetric physicians negligently delayed a C-section through a prolonged labor, leaving a first-time mother's newborn with a brain injury and lifelong disability, and returned a $38,816,500 verdict.
A Marion County jury awarded $9.4 million after a Cracker Barrel waitress refilled a customer's glass with a mix of water and commercial bleach instead of ice water.
A Shelby County jury awarded tanker driver Donriel Borne $3,705,000 after a Celadon tractor-trailer rear-ended him in stopped construction-zone traffic on Interstate 55, and the case later set the standard Tennessee appellate courts use to review a reduced verdict.
A Shelby County jury awarded Julius Malone and his wife $2,519,772 after an ASF Intermodal semi-truck merged into his lane on I-240 in Memphis, and Tennessee's noneconomic-damages cap later reduced the judgment to $1,529,772.
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.