$74.1 Million Verdict for Family of Delivery Driver Crushed by Machinery at Ford Assembly Plant
After trial: The jury awarded $38 million in compensatory damages and $38 million for aggravating circumstances and put 5 percent of the fault on David Ford, so the court cut the compensatory part to $36.1 million and entered judgment for $74.1 million, which the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, affirmed in full on June 25, 2019.
Won by Ketchmark & McCreight, P.C..
A Clay County, Missouri jury awarded $76 million to the family of David Ford, a 48-year-old delivery driver crushed by moving machinery while dropping off vehicle seats at Ford Motor Company's Kansas City Assembly Plant. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict in full in 2019.
What happened
In December 2015, David Ford was working as a delivery driver for Walkenhorst Transportation, a contractor that hauled vehicle seats to Ford Motor Company's Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Missouri. It was his thirteenth day on the route. While he was delivering seats bound for the F-150 assembly line, a conveyor jammed. Ford entered the area near the seat stripper equipment to clear it, and the moving carrier system pinned him between a stationary guard rail and the machinery. The force of the crush was later compared at trial to a high-velocity motor vehicle accident.
The injuries were catastrophic. Ford, 48, suffered a severed inferior vena cava, multiple broken ribs, spinal fractures, and internal bleeding. He underwent open-heart surgery and died a week after the incident. He shared a surname with the automaker but had no relation to it. His wife Lisa and his sons brought a wrongful death suit against Ford Motor Company in the Circuit Court of Clay County.
The family's case was that Ford Motor knew about the dangerous pinch point in its equipment and did nothing about it. They alleged the company was negligent for failing to remove or barricade the hazard, or at minimum to warn visiting workers that it existed. Michael Ketchmark, Scott McCreight, and Ben Fadler of Ketchmark & McCreight tried the case for the family. Ford Motor denied any negligence and disputed the claim that prior incidents had occurred at the same point in the machinery.
After an eight-day trial, the jury returned its verdict on February 23, 2018. It assessed 95 percent of the fault to Ford Motor and 5 percent to David Ford, and awarded $38 million in compensatory damages plus another $38 million in damages for aggravating circumstances, a total of $76 million.
Ford Motor appealed, raising seven points. It argued the trial court should have treated Ford as a trespasser, that the pinch point was an open and obvious danger as a matter of law, that evidence of similar prior incidents should have been excluded, and that the aggravating circumstances instruction was flawed, among other claims. On June 25, 2019, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District rejected every argument and affirmed the judgment in full, leaving the jury's verdict and its allocation of fault intact.
The case is Lisa Ann Ford and David Jacob Ford v. Ford Motor Company, No. WD 81832, Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Ketchmark & McCreight, P.C.
All Ketchmark & McCreight, P.C. proven verdicts →Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.
A Monroe County jury awarded $58.6 million, including $56.6 million in punitive damages, to James Graham, a Hannibal food plant worker who developed the irreversible lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans after years of exposure to Givaudan butter flavoring chemicals. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in April 2026.
A woman sued a commercial property owner for wrongful death after her child was shot and killed on the property in Kansas City, alleging the landowner had failed to provide adequate security measures and precautions. The case was handled under a confidentiality agreement that keeps the parties' identities and the property's location out of the public record. It was resolved in Jackson County Circuit Court on May 31, 2024, under the caption Confidential v. Confidential, for $27,000,000. Missouri Lawyers Media, which reported the settlement and reached plaintiff's counsel for comment, later listed it as the top settlement in its Top Verdicts and Settlements roundup for 2024.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.