Wind-Blown Hood Costs Tow Truck Driver His Eye In $9.5 Million Verdict

On January 23, 2012, Quentin Ravizza was working as a commercial tow truck driver for District Recovery, Inc. in the Chicago area when he was sent to tow a stalled UPS freight truck. On the way, his own vehicle, a 1997 Kenworth T800 heavy duty tow truck the company called Truck 55, broke down on Harlem Avenue near 60th Street in Summit, Illinois. Ravizza stepped out, opened the hood and leaned in to check the engine. A gust of wind estimated at 35 miles per hour caught the hood and slammed it shut on his head.

Ravizza suffered a fractured skull and the destruction of his right eye, which doctors later removed. He sued PACCAR, Inc., the manufacturer of the truck, and District Rebuilders, Inc., the mechanic company that maintained it. His suit alleged that PACCAR had negligently designed and manufactured the truck without an adequate device to keep the hood from blowing shut, and that Rebuilders had failed in its maintenance duties by never replacing the safety cable and hook system that should have held the hood open. At trial, evidence showed the truck did not have that system installed at the time of the accident, and that PACCAR had known since at least 1991, when a similar near miss was reported by another driver, that the cable and hook design could fail.

The case went to a Cook County jury on June 5, 2017, with Christopher Hurley and Mark McKenna of Hurley McKenna & Mertz, P.C. trying it for Ravizza, according to contemporaneous news coverage. Over three weeks of testimony from roughly 28 witnesses, Ravizza's expert, a mechanical engineer, testified that PACCAR had other, safer hood blowback devices available at the time, including a strut system and a hinge lock, and that the cable and hook system PACCAR chose was not recognizable as a safety device and unlikely to be reinstalled once removed during repairs. The jury agreed, finding PACCAR 70 percent at fault, Rebuilders 25 percent at fault and Ravizza 5 percent at fault. It awarded $10 million in compensatory damages, itemized as $2.5 million for disfigurement, $1.25 million for disability already experienced and $2.5 million for future disability, and $1.25 million for past pain and suffering and $2.5 million for future pain and suffering. Finding that PACCAR's conduct in designing the system was willful and wanton, the jury also awarded $10 million in punitive damages against PACCAR alone, a total verdict of $20 million.

In March 2018, the trial court denied PACCAR and Rebuilders' post-trial motions, including their request for a remittitur, but reduced the compensatory award against PACCAR from $10 million to $9.5 million, a cut equal to the jury's 5 percent allocation of fault to Ravizza. The appellate court later affirmed the refusal to remit, holding the compensatory award was not excessive.

Both defendants appealed. On September 8, 2020, the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, affirmed the $9.5 million compensatory judgment, rejecting PACCAR's argument that the verdict was inconsistent or against the weight of the evidence. The court found ample support for the jury's conclusion that PACCAR's cable and hook design was defective because it could go unnoticed and unreplaced once removed during repairs.

The punitive damages did not survive. The appellate court vacated the $10 million punitive judgment against PACCAR, holding that the safety device the jury had found willfully and wantonly designed, the cable and hook system, was not actually on the truck when Ravizza was hurt. As the court put it, 'it was not Paccar's manufactured device that actually failed at the time of the incident; in fact, it was no one's device.' Without that device present at the time of the accident, the court found no evidence PACCAR had deliberately or consciously disregarded Ravizza's safety in the moment of the injury, breaking the causal link punitive damages require.

What survived the appeal was the $9.5 million compensatory judgment. Ravizza, who was 26 at the time of the accident, later trained as an electrician and was working full time as a journeyman electrician by the time of trial.