Clay County Jury Awards $76 Million to Family of Delivery Driver Crushed by Machinery at Ford's Kansas City Assembly Plant
After trial: Affirmed in full by the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, 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 →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.
Related wrongful death verdicts
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.
Leavitt, Yamane and Soldner represented Maui wildfire survivors and victims' families in the $4.037 billion global settlement resolving approximately 450 lawsuits arising from the August 2023 Lahaina fire.
A Polk County jury awarded $110 million in compensatory damages and $1 billion in punitive damages over the death of 69-year-old Arlene Townsend, who fell 17 times at the Auburndale Oaks Healthcare Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case against Trans Healthcare entities that had defaulted, stopped defending, and were already insolvent and in receivership, which is why the judgment was largely symbolic and the estate ultimately recovered only a small share of a later multi-estate settlement.