Houston Jury Awards $12.45 Million After New Prime Truck Rear-Ends Car on I-45; Texas Supreme Court Reverses
After trial: The Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed in 2022, but the Supreme Court of Texas reversed on May 10, 2024 and remanded for a new trial on damages, so no award currently stands. The reversal rested on a rebuttal closing argument, not on the amount or on liability, which was conceded.
Won by Kherkher Garcia.
A Harris County jury awarded Christine John $12 million and Christopher Lewis $450,000 for physical pain and mental anguish after a New Prime tractor-trailer rear-ended their car on Interstate 45. The driver and New Prime conceded liability, so the trial covered damages only. The Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed in 2022, but the Texas Supreme Court reversed in May 2024 over a line of closing argument and remanded for a new trial on damages.
What happened
On a September day in 2012, Christine John, then 24, was driving a Nissan Sentra on Interstate 45 in the Houston area with Christopher Lewis as a passenger. A tractor-trailer driven by Roberto Alonzo for New Prime, Inc. struck the car from behind and pushed it into another vehicle.
John hit her head in the crash and was taken to a hospital complaining of head and neck pain. An MRI showed bulging and herniated discs in her spine. She later developed pain in her jaw and was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve condition affecting the face. Lewis was diagnosed with spinal stenosis in his neck and back, a bulging disc in the lumbar spine, and radiculopathy in the lumbar and cervical regions.
Alonzo and New Prime conceded liability, which left the 129th District Court in Harris County to decide only what the injuries were worth. Steven J. Kherkher and Kevin Haynes are listed among counsel for John and Lewis in both the Fourteenth Court of Appeals opinion and the Supreme Court of Texas docket.
The jury returned its verdict in 2019. It awarded John $12 million and Lewis $450,000, in each case for physical pain and mental anguish. It assessed no exemplary damages.
The defense appealed on the size of the awards. On March 29, 2022, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, rejecting the argument that the damages were excessive.
The Supreme Court of Texas took the case and ruled differently on May 10, 2024. In a per curiam opinion, it held that a remark in plaintiffs' rebuttal closing was an incurable jury argument. Defense counsel had suggested a much lower award for John, and plaintiffs' counsel answered by asking whether she should get less money because she is a woman or because she is African American. The court found nothing in the trial evidence to support an accusation of bias and treated the appeal to race and gender as harmful error that an instruction could not cure. It reversed the judgment and sent the case back for a new trial on damages.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Supreme Court of Texas docket, Alonzo v. John, No. 22-0521, opinion May 10, 2024·Archived copy
- 2.Fourteenth Court of Appeals of Texas, Alonzo v. John, No. 14-20-00148-CV, opinion, March 29, 2022
- 3.Supreme Court of Texas, Alonzo v. John, No. 22-0521, per curiam opinion, May 10, 2024·Archived copy
- 4.Wood Smith Henning & Berman, 'Nuclear No More: Supreme Court Overturns $12 Million Damage Award'·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Kherkher Garcia
All Kherkher Garcia proven verdicts →A Philadelphia jury in May 2005 awarded two women a combined $200 million for heart-valve injuries caused by Wyeth's fen-phen diet drugs, with Steve Kherkher of Williams Bailey (now Kherkher Garcia) leading the trial, before a judge granted Wyeth's post-trial motion and the case resolved through a confidential settlement.
A St. Louis jury found Monsanto liable for polychlorinated biphenyl contamination that caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma in three plaintiffs, awarding $46.5 million in the first PCB cancer case of its kind tried to verdict in St. Louis.
A Harris County jury awarded $15 million to the husband and two sons of a longtime hospital nurse struck and killed while crossing the street to an employer parking lot, with Steve Kherkher among the trial team for the family.
Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.