$60 Million Verdict Over Fatal Gas Tank Fire Upheld On Appeal

On July 3, 1991, Robert and Connie McGee were on vacation in Virginia with their two children, traveling as passengers in a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser station wagon that belonged to a relative. The car had stopped at a highway toll booth near Virginia Beach when a homemade trailer broke loose from a pickup truck driven by Curtis Cayton, rolled across four lanes of traffic, and struck the back of the wagon. The people inside felt no more than a slight tap. The trailer's tongue had driven into the Oldsmobile's fuel tank, and the escaping gasoline ignited and exploded.

The McGees' 13 year old son suffered full thickness burns over 98 percent of his body and died two hours after reaching the emergency room. The treating physician described his burns as the worst he had ever seen in a patient who arrived alive. His mother, Connie McGee, was burned over 50 percent of her body, spent five to six weeks in the hospital, and later needed surgery to correct scar tissue that had sealed the corners of her mouth. His 11 year old sister was burned over 20 to 24 percent of her body, including her face and neck, and was left permanently scarred. His father, Robert McGee, suffered burns to his leg and hand that required a skin graft.

The McGees sued General Motors, arguing the Cutlass Cruiser's fuel tank was defectively designed because it sat between the rear axle and the bumper with nothing to shield it from an object that could puncture it. At trial in Broward County, plaintiffs' counsel called Ronald Elwell, an engineer who had spent thirty years at General Motors and had worked for sixteen or seventeen of them on post collision fuel fed fires. He testified that the company's own testing had shown the tank leaking, that a shield would have protected it, and that a GM safety engineer had told him a shield was too expensive to add.

On May 18, 1998, after a trial that ran close to six months, the jury returned a verdict of $60,000,000 in compensatory damages: $7 million to the daughter, $31 million to Connie and $22 million to Robert, covering their own injuries, loss of consortium, and the loss of their son. The jury declined to award punitive damages. It also found Cayton 45 percent at fault for the underlying collision and General Motors 55 percent at fault, and the trial court applied that split to cut the McGees' recovery against GM to roughly $33 million.

Both sides appealed. Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal issued its decision on December 18, 2002 and modified it on clarification on March 5, 2003, vacating the comparative fault apportionment. The panel held that ordinary comparative fault principles do not apply to the enhanced injury portion of a crashworthiness case: General Motors answered for the burns caused by its defective fuel tank regardless of who caused the initial collision. The court also rejected GM's argument that the damages were excessive, writing that the panel had more than sixty years of combined judicial experience and that these injuries, and the suffering they caused, were extraordinary, among the worst the panel had ever encountered. The trial court entered an amended final judgment for the full $60,000,000 on May 6, 2003.

General Motors appealed a second time, disputing when interest on the judgment began to run. In a March 17, 2004 opinion, the Fourth District held that interest accrued from the May 18, 1998 verdict date rather than from the later date GM proposed, leaving the McGees with the full $60,000,000 plus years of accrued interest.

Robert W. Kelley and John J. Uustal tried the case for the McGees as attorneys at Sheldon J. Schlesinger, P.A. in Fort Lauderdale, working alongside Sheldon J. Schlesinger, with Arnold R. Ginsberg of Ginsberg and Schwartz in Miami on the appeal. Kelley and Uustal founded Kelley Uustal in 2006, eight years after the verdict.