$1.25 Million Settlement After Distracted Landfill Bulldozer Operator Killed Waste Management Driver
A $1.25 million settlement resolved a wrongful-death claim against the City of Winston-Salem after a probationary city landfill operator, distracted by personal phone calls, backed a bulldozer into Waste Management driver Thomas Thompson and killed him.
What happened
Thomas Thompson spent his career behind the wheel of a Waste Management roll-off truck, making regular runs to the Hanes Mill Road Landfill operated by the City of Winston-Salem. On June 11, 2021, the trip ended in seconds. After a city spotter directed Thompson where to dump his load, he stepped out of his cab to work the hand levers on the truck's exterior. At that moment, city employee Brycen Burcham put his bulldozer in reverse and backed directly into Thompson, killing him on the spot.
The phone records told a damning story. By the time Burcham reversed the bulldozer that afternoon, he had called his girlfriend 94 times during the same workday. That call was the one in progress when he reversed without checking his surroundings. The distraction was not a lapse in an otherwise clean record: Burcham had accumulated multiple incidents involving city equipment during his six-month probationary period and carried an extensive history of negligent driving before ever operating that bulldozer at the landfill.
Maginnis Howard attorney Shawn Howard, working alongside Winston-Salem co-counsel C. Douglas Maynard Jr., filed suit against the City of Winston-Salem in Forsyth County Superior Court (Case No. 23 CVS 2810). The case centered on whether the city was responsible for placing a probationary employee with a documented reckless-driving history behind heavy equipment at an active commercial dumping site, and whether Burcham's conduct on the day of the crash crossed from negligence into recklessness.
The city reached a $1.25 million settlement in November 2025. The funds were distributed to Thompson's wife of 45 years and their two adult children.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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