West Penn Power Faces a $109 Million Verdict in a Fatal Backyard Electrocution, Later Paid $105 Million
After trial: West Penn Power dropped its appeal of the $109 million verdict in February 2013 and agreed to pay $105 million instead, ending the case without a court ruling on the appeal.
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
An Allegheny County jury found West Penn Power negligent for the splice failure that dropped a live 7,200-volt line on Carrie Goretzka in her own backyard. The 2012 verdict reached $109 million. The utility later paid a reported $105 million to drop its appeal.
What happened
On June 2, 2009, Carrie Goretzka walked into her backyard in Hempfield Township, Pennsylvania, to call West Penn Power. A line over her property was arcing in the trees and had again cut power to the house. As she dialed, a 7,200-volt conductor broke loose and fell on her. She was 39. Her two young daughters and her mother-in-law watched as the live wire burned her, and the family could do nothing but wait for crews to shut off the power. Goretzka suffered burns across most of her body. Doctors amputated her arm trying to save her. She died three days later.
Shanin Specter of Kline & Specter tried the case for her husband, Michael Goretzka, who sued as administrator of her estate. The firm traced the failure to the splice that joined the conductor running over the yard. West Penn Power crews had spliced the line without first cleaning the wire with a brush, a step the manufacturer's instructions required. Skipping it let the connection corrode, overheat, and eventually let go. Evidence showed the line over the property had fallen before, and the utility had not corrected the underlying defect. The firm presented the death not as a freak accident but as the result of preventable, repeated negligence in maintaining the line.
In December 2012, an Allegheny County jury returned $109 million, consisting of $48 million in compensatory damages and $61 million in punitive damages. It stood as the largest contested-liability personal-injury verdict in Pennsylvania history at the time. West Penn Power appealed. In February 2013, the company dropped that appeal and paid a reported $105 million to close the case. The two numbers are distinct: the jury awarded $109 million, and the post-verdict settlement was reported at $105 million.
The case carried consequences beyond the payment. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission penalized West Penn Power and required it to retrain its linemen on proper splicing and to inspect existing splices for the same defect. As part of that enforcement action, the utility paid an $86,000 fine.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Kline & Specter, PC
All Kline & Specter, PC proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
A Philadelphia jury found that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup could cause cancer and awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion. The trial judge later reduced the award to $400 million.
After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.
A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.
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.