Johnston County Jury Awards $5.1 Million for Clayton Wrongful Death After a 40-Minute Deliberation
A Johnston County jury awarded $5.1 million to the family of Joan Drake, killed when a driver going 98 mph struck her car as she turned into a Clayton Walmart, after Farrin attorneys Coleman Cowan and Donald Clack tried the case without putting on a single medical bill.
What happened
On June 26, 2023, Joan Drake was turning left off U.S. 70 Business in Clayton, North Carolina, into a Walmart parking lot. A car traveling east struck her vehicle at 98 miles per hour. Drake died at the scene from multiple blunt force injuries.
The driver, Malakhi Holt, had been moving at nearly 100 miles per hour on a commercial stretch of road lined with storefronts, signals, and turning traffic. Evidence developed in the case indicated that Holt was either caught up in a road rage incident or racing a second vehicle that was never identified. What the jury heard was a picture of a driver who treated a busy business route like a track.
Drake was the mother of two adult sons. Her estate retained Coleman Cowan and Donald Clack of the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin, who brought a wrongful death claim and tried it in Johnston County Superior Court, case number 23 CVS 6650, before Judge Paul Holcombe.
The way the firm proved damages set this trial apart. Cowan and Clack put on no medical bills, no funeral expenses, and no claim for lost income. North Carolina's wrongful death statute allows a jury to award the monetary value of the care, comfort, and guidance the deceased provided to her family. The lawyers asked the jury to weigh exactly that: what Joan Drake had meant to her sons across their lives. The trial centered on her role in the family rather than on a ledger of economic losses.
That approach carried real risk. Damages awards often lean on hard numbers like hospital charges and lost wages, and the plaintiff offered none of them here. The jury was left to assign a dollar figure to a relationship.
It did so quickly. On April 23, 2025, after about 40 minutes of deliberation, the Johnston County jury returned a verdict of $5.1 million in compensatory damages. With interest and costs added by the court, the total judgment came to more than $5.6 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Law Offices of James Scott Farrin
All Law Offices of James Scott Farrin proven verdicts →Farrin co-lead counsel Gary Jackson won an $8 million class settlement for roughly 6,500 residents forced from their homes by the 2022 ammonium nitrate fire at the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant, with a separate $4.5 million for affected businesses.
A mother and her two teenage daughters were seriously hurt in an October 2018 head-on crash on North Carolina Highway 49 with a company truck driven by an unlicensed man. After the injury claims were resolved by agreement, a federal court held that the construction company's commercial excess policy covered the accident and that interest was owed on top. The Fourth Circuit affirmed in August 2025, and the family's total recovery reached $2,861,458.
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.