$14 Million Verdict for Student Maimed by Pennsbury School Bus, Limited to $500,000 by State Cap
After trial: Pennsylvania's tort-claims cap cut the recovery to $500,000.
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
A Bucks County jury awarded just over $14 million after a Pennsbury School District bus jumped a curb and crushed a teenage student, costing her a leg. Thomas Kline of Kline & Specter tried the case. Pennsylvania's tort-claims cap later cut the recovery to $500,000.
What happened
On the afternoon of January 12, 2007, a group of about twenty students stood on the sidewalk outside Pennsbury High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A district school bus surged forward, climbed the curb, and drove into them. Investigators later concluded that the driver had pressed the accelerator instead of the brake.
Ashley Zauflik, then 17 and a senior at the school, was pinned beneath the bus. Her pelvis was crushed and her left leg was damaged so severely that surgeons amputated it above the knee. She faced a lifetime of prosthetic care and repeated medical treatment, and she was 21 by the time her case reached a jury.
Kline & Specter, led by Thomas Kline, sued the Pennsbury School District in the case captioned Zauflik v. Pennsbury School District. After a four-day trial in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas, the jury returned its verdict on December 5, 2011. It found for Zauflik and put a number on what she had lost.
The award came to $14,036,263.39. Of that, $338,580 covered past medical expenses, $2,597,682 covered future medical care, and $11.1 million was for past and future pain and suffering.
The full sum never reached her. Pennsylvania's Political Subdivision Tort Claims Act, a 1980 statute, limits damages against a local government to $500,000 for any single incident, the same amount the district had already offered. Bucks County Judge Robert Mellon molded the verdict down to that figure. He acknowledged the result was unjust but said the law gave him no choice.
Kline pushed the constitutional question up the appellate ladder. "If equal protection means anything," he argued, "an innocent victim such as Ms. Zauflik should not be stripped of her jury verdict because she was crushed under a government-operated rather than a privately operated school bus." The Commonwealth Court affirmed the cap in 2013. On November 19, 2014, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed, holding that the $500,000 limit did not violate the remedies clause of the state constitution.
The jury valued Zauflik's injuries at more than $14 million. Under the cap, her recovery from the verdict stayed at $500,000.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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