Paralyzed Navy Veteran Awarded $35 Million Over Broward Car Crash

Marc Laspes was 26 and newly engaged on August 2, 2017. He had proposed that morning, by his lawyers' account of the day. He was driving near Sheridan Street and North 35th Avenue in Broward County when his vehicle and a car driven by Talena Castillo, then 25, collided. Laspes did not wake up until three days later, in a hospital bed, unable to feel his legs.

The crash left him with a burst fracture in one of his vertebrae, and the damage to his spine paralyzed him from the chest down. He had served four years in the Navy and had been honorably discharged just over a year earlier. He was an avid surfer, skateboarder and golfer before the wreck. Afterward, his trial lawyer told the Daily Business Review, simply getting ready in the morning became a two-hour process, and the basics other people never think about, showering, using the bathroom, holding a relationship together, became obstacles. The engagement did not survive. His fiancee became his caretaker, and the relationship ended about a year after the crash.

Laspes hired Michael A. Hersh and Kimberly L. Wald, then trial attorneys at Kelley Uustal, and brought a negligence claim. The complaint identified two drivers involved in the crash but pursued only Castillo as the party responsible, alleging she had operated her car carelessly and caused the collision that left him injured and paralyzed. The case, CACE-17-017741, took nearly four years to reach a jury. It was tried in Broward County Circuit Court before Judge Mily Rodriguez-Powell, with Guy Seligman defending Castillo, and by the firm's account it was one of the first in-person civil trials the county held after its courthouse reopened from the COVID-19 shutdown.

At trial, Hersh and Wald spent less time on the medical record than on what a permanent spinal cord injury had done to one specific young man's daily life. Laspes testified himself. He told the jury that his hardest work each day was staying mentally positive, because without that the physical condition would become something he could not keep carrying. On July 13, 2021, the jury returned a verdict of $35 million.

In a statement issued through his lawyers afterward, Laspes said he was living a terrible nightmare every single day, and that one minute he had been enjoying life to the fullest and the next he was paralyzed. No appeal, remittitur or reduction has turned up in a search of Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal and of later coverage of the case, and nothing public shows whether the verdict was ever collected from Castillo. Hersh and Wald have both since left Kelley Uustal, Hersh to Hersh Kirtman Injury Law and Wald to The Haggard Law Firm, but the result belongs to the firm of record.