Milwaukee County Jury Returns $633,682 Verdict in Day-Care Van Death of 7-Year-Old
Won by Gruber Law Offices, LLC.
A Milwaukee County jury found a day-care van driver 85 percent at fault for fatally running over a 7-year-old boy on his way to school, awarding his family $633,682 in damages.
What happened
On the morning of February 8, 2007, a 7-year-old boy in Milwaukee set out for school. His 15-year-old uncle walked with him. A day-care van driven by Heidi L. Allison came through, and the boy went under it. This was not a single impact. The van ran over him several times. He did not survive his injuries.
His mother brought a claim for his death. Under Wisconsin's wrongful-death statute, a parent can recover for the loss of a child's society and companionship, and a separate claim can cover the pain the child felt before dying. Both were at issue here. The case was captioned Kimbrough v. Allison.
Gruber Law Offices filed the suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court on June 5, 2007, about four months after the boy was killed. Attorneys Geoffrey D. Wilber and Werner Erich Scherr represented the family. The case (number 2007CV006473) went to trial before Judge Thomas Cooper, more than a year and a half after it was filed.
The driver carried coverage through National Indemnity Company. Her counsel, Roger H. Weede, argued that the 15-year-old uncle who had been walking with the boy shared the blame for what happened on the street that morning. Dr. Robert Niebler testified for the plaintiffs, and Dr. Randal Wojciehoski testified for the defense. To prevail, the family's lawyers had to show that the way the van was driven caused the death and to answer the comparative-fault theory aimed at the teenager. Before trial, the most the defense had offered to settle was $130,000. The family had asked for $1,000,000.
On December 18, 2008, the jury sided with the family. It found the van driver 85 percent negligent and the uncle 15 percent negligent. The total damages came to $633,682: $56,332 in medical expenses, $2,350 in funeral costs, $300,000 for the boy's conscious pain and suffering, and $275,000 for the mother's loss of her son's society and companionship.
Wisconsin applies comparative negligence, so the 15 percent of fault assigned to the uncle reduced what the family could collect from the driver to her 85 percent share. Even after that reduction, the award came to roughly $538,600, more than four times the highest offer the defense had put on the table before trial.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.