$30 Million Henry County Verdict for a Rural Mail Carrier Left With Permanent Brain Damage After a Jack Dropped in the Roadway Caused a Crash
After trial: The award was apportioned 75 percent to Sterns and 25 percent to Ward. No appeal or post-trial reduction has been reported.
Won by Lucas Law Firm, LLC.
A Henry County jury awarded $30 million to Tylor Smading, a backseat passenger who suffered permanent brain damage when the car she was riding in crossed the center line, struck a jack that had fallen from another defendant's vehicle, and hit an oncoming car. The jury put 75 percent of the fault on the man who lost the jack.
What happened
Tylor Smading was working as a rural mail carrier, a job that put her on country roads every day, when the crash that ended that career happened. She was not driving. She was riding in the back seat of a vehicle driven by Mikinzie Ward.
A jack had come off a vehicle belonging to Frank Sterns and was lying in the roadway. Ward moved across the center line, struck the jack, and then struck a vehicle coming the other way.
Smading's injuries ran from her head to her abdomen: brain damage, along with injuries to her neck, shoulders, arms, legs and chest. The brain injury proved permanent. She was left with short-term and long-term memory loss and with lost peripheral vision. The combination ended her postal career and left her unable to manage her own affairs, and the suit was brought on her behalf by co-guardians and co-conservators Kyle and Sandy Smading.
The case was tried in Henry County Circuit Court under case number 20BS-CC00002-01, before Judge M. Brandon Baker. The two sides were far apart on value going in. Smading's last demand before verdict was $3 million. The last offer from the defense was $500,000. Ward was insured by Missouri Farm Bureau and, with Sterns, was defended by Michael T. Moulder and Brittain E. McClurg of Morrow Willnauer Church. The trial ran on expert testimony from accident reconstruction, life care planning, vocational and economic witnesses.
The plaintiff's case turned on how a jury would divide responsibility between the driver who crossed the center line and the man whose equipment ended up in the road. On January 31, 2025, the jury returned $30 million and allocated fault 75 percent to Sterns and 25 percent to Ward. That produced awards of $22.5 million against Sterns and $7.5 million against Ward, placing the larger share on the party who lost the jack rather than on the driver in whose car Smading was riding.
Chad C. Lucas and Timothy C. Gaarder of Lucas Law Firm in Kansas City tried the case, with Matthew McCoy of Presley & Presley as co-counsel. Gaarder is better known in Missouri for railroad work, including a $17 million verdict in Sisk v. BNSF Railway Company in 2019, and both the trial report and his firm biography place him alongside Lucas on this file. His biography names the case directly: a $30,000,000 personal injury verdict in a motor vehicle crash, out of Henry County.
Missouri Lawyers Media covered the verdict when it came in and later included it in its roundup of the state's top verdicts and settlements for 2025. No post-trial ruling cutting the award and no Missouri appellate opinion in the case have been reported as of September 2026. The judgment on the books remains $30 million, split $22.5 million and $7.5 million between the two defendants.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and the honest frame is that it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The honest frame: the award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.