$900,000 Settlement for Family of College Student Killed in New Jersey Crosswalk
Won by Maggiano DiGirolamo & Lizzi.
Christopher DiGirolamo secured a $900,000 settlement for the family of a 26-year-old college student who was struck and killed by a car while crossing at a marked crosswalk in New Jersey.
What happened
A 26-year-old college student was crossing at a marked crosswalk when a driver struck and killed her. She had been using the designated crossing area as intended, giving her family no reason to expect the intersection would become the site of her death.
The collision drew attention beyond the immediate family. Local officials in the area later moved to address the crosswalk's safety conditions, a development reported by the Herald-News in August 2017. That coverage noted planned upgrades at the crossing where the student was killed, reflecting the kind of real-world consequence that wrongful death litigation can sometimes produce even when it does not reach trial.
Christopher DiGirolamo of Maggiano, DiGirolamo and Lizzi took on the family's case. The claim centered on the driver's failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, a straightforward duty under New Jersey law. The family also faced the task of documenting their daughter's lost future, including her academic path and the financial and emotional support she would have provided.
The parties reached a $900,000 settlement. The resolution was reported by the Jersey Journal on August 17, 2017, and confirmed in subsequent local coverage. No appeal or reduction is reflected in the public record of this case.
The student's death prompted attention to pedestrian safety at the crossing where she was killed. The Herald-News reported on crosswalk upgrades planned for the location, tying the physical changes in the neighborhood directly to the aftermath of the crash.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.