$831 Million Dram Shop Verdict Against Shuttered New Braunfels Bar, Largest From a San Antonio Jury

On the night of July 25, 2021, Blas Mendez Jr. was riding his Harley-Davidson home near San Marcos, about two miles from his house, when he came upon debris scattered across the roadway. Minutes earlier, an 18-year-old named Carlos Alexander Portillo Jr. had crashed his car into a guardrail, leaving wreckage in the road. Mendez hit it and went down hard. Testing later showed Portillo had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.23 percent, roughly three times the legal limit for an adult and a startling number for a driver who was not legally allowed to drink at all. Portillo eventually pleaded guilty to intoxication assault.

Mendez was 51, and for 21 years he had worked as a behavior specialist in the Seguin Independent School District's special education department. The crash took most of that life away. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and multiple fractures, and he was left with paralysis on his right side and expressive aphasia that strips away much of his ability to communicate. He uses a wheelchair and depends on his wife Leticia and their children for constant care.

The question the lawsuit put to a jury was where an 18-year-old got that drunk. The answer, according to the case, was Koozies Icehouse & Grill, a bar on the river road strip in New Braunfels owned by Robert Kane. The suit, brought under the Texas Dram Shop Act, alleged the bar let the underage Portillo and a companion buy and drink large quantities of alcohol without checking IDs. Leticia Mendez sued the bar's corporate entity, River Road Entertainment District Corporation, along with Kane and Portillo, in Bexar County District Court in San Antonio, case number 2022CI12617. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the case for the family together with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm.

In May 2025 the jury returned its answer, and it was emphatic. Jurors put 45 percent of the responsibility on Koozies, 45 percent on Kane personally, and only 10 percent on the drunk driver. Per The Texas Lawbook's accounting, the verdict awarded about $281.45 million to Blas Mendez and $249.88 million to Leticia, then added $300 million in exemplary damages against Koozies and Kane, for a total of roughly $831 million. Local press reported it as the largest verdict ever awarded by a San Antonio jury.

What the family will actually receive is the part of this story that has to be told straight. Koozies had already shut its doors by the time of trial, and press coverage was blunt that the Mendez family is not likely to see most, if any, of the $831 million, because a defunct bar and its owner do not have anything close to that in assets or insurance. As of The Texas Lawbook's year-end report, no appeal had been filed. What the verdict delivered was not a payout but a public accounting: a jury's formal finding that a bar that served a teenager into a 0.23 stupor bears nine times the responsibility of the teenager himself for what happened to the man on the motorcycle down the road.