Marion County Jury Awards $3.9 Million to Teen Cyclist Run Over by Durham School Bus

On the morning of September 15, 2010, a 17-year-old junior at Ben Davis High School was riding his bicycle west on Washington Street in Indianapolis, on his usual route to school. A Durham School Services bus, driven by an employee under contract to Indianapolis Public Schools, turned onto the same stretch of road behind him at about 6 a.m. The boy was less than thirty feet in front of it.

The driver's assigned route called for a right turn at Tibbs Avenue, which the teenager knew, and he moved left to make his own turn there. The driver instead left her route, accelerated and pulled into the left lane. The bus struck him and came to rest with a tire on his left foot. The driver then moved the bus off that foot, and in doing so ran over his right leg.

He was taken to the hospital in critical condition and stayed sixteen days. His right ankle was fractured and needed surgery to attach external hardware. The skin on his left foot was torn away in what doctors called a degloving injury, which took a skin graft and several operations. He also had a compression fracture in his thoracic spine and a major laceration of the spleen that required an embolization procedure to stop the bleeding. He spent weeks in a wheelchair and in physical therapy and fell behind at school. A Marine ROTC student who had planned to enlist, he was told his back injury would keep him out of the Corps.

The case went to a Marion County jury from October 16 to 19, 2012. The appellate record lists Jeff Shaw of Ken Nunn Law Office in Bloomington as the plaintiff's counsel, with Bryan H. Babb of Bose McKinney & Evans. The plaintiff's theory was that the driver was running behind schedule and trying to avoid discipline and late-arrival penalties under the district contract, and that she hit him from behind while speeding. Durham's defense was that the teenager turned into the bus's path and that the driver faced a sudden emergency. Its accident reconstruction expert described a side-swipe after the bicycle cut across. An eyewitness testified that bus and bicycle changed lanes at the same moment.

The jury deliberated across two days and found Durham and its driver 75 percent at fault and the plaintiff 25 percent at fault. It set total damages at $5.2 million, which the court reduced by the plaintiff's share to a judgment of about $3.9 million. The defendants asked the trial court for a new trial or a reduction of the award, and the court denied both requests.

On appeal, Durham and the driver argued that the full district contract, 25 injury photographs and the 911 recording should not have reached the jury, that plaintiff's counsel's closing argument was improper, and that the award was excessive. On January 24, 2014, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed. It held that some objections had not been preserved at trial and that the contested evidence was properly admitted, and it called the excessiveness argument a request to reweigh the evidence, which an appellate court will not do.