$37 Million Verdict After FPL Killed Traffic Signal, Killing a 12-Year-Old
Won by Grossman Yaffa Cohen.
Stuart Grossman and Andrew Yaffa secured a $37.37 million wrongful-death verdict against Florida Power and Light after a utility crew deactivated a traffic signal without notifying police, causing a fatal multi-vehicle collision that killed a 12-year-old girl.
What happened
On September 12, 1997, an FPL lineman disconnected power at a utility pole in the Miami area during repair work nearby. He did not realize the same pole fed a nearby traffic signal, and no one from FPL called police, placed flaggers, or put up any warning. The signal went dark, leaving a busy intersection uncontrolled.
Minutes later, Rosalie Goldberg drove her Mercedes-Benz through the now-uncontrolled intersection with her 12-year-old daughter Jill. The car was struck by a Ford Expedition and then hit by a GMC Suburban. Jill died from her injuries. Her parents, Walter and Rosalie Goldberg, brought a wrongful-death action against FPL, arguing the utility had a duty to alert authorities or otherwise secure the intersection before leaving the power off.
Stuart Grossman and Andrew Yaffa of Grossman and Roth, P.A. represented the Goldberg family at trial before Judge Juan Ramirez, Jr. in Miami. The case turned on whether FPL's failure to notify police of the outage constituted actionable negligence and whether that failure was the proximate cause of Jill's death. On March 15, 1999, the jury returned a verdict of $37,372,000 in favor of the plaintiffs.
FPL appealed. An initial panel of the Third District Court of Appeal affirmed the liability finding but concluded the damages were excessive and remitted the award to $10 million. Sitting en banc, the full Third District reversed outright and entered judgment for FPL. The Florida Supreme Court then took up the case, quashed the en banc decision, and reinstated the panel's ruling, leaving the verdict in place at the remitted figure of $10 million.
At the time of the trial verdict, the $37.37 million award was described by MoreLaw's verdict reporter as believed to be the largest wrongful-death verdict for a minor plaintiff in American jurisprudence.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.
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