Tractor-Trailer Lane Change on I-95 Kills Retired Veteran; Family Settles for $10 Million
Won by Marks & Harrison.
A tractor-trailer drifted into a retired 20-year veteran's lane on Interstate 95 North and killed him, and Marks & Harrison recovered $10 million for his family before any lawsuit was filed.
What happened
During the summer of 2023, a tractor-trailer was traveling in the middle lane of Interstate 95 North in Virginia. The driver moved into the right lane without seeing the car that was already there. The truck struck that vehicle and a second one, and the man driving the car died at the scene.
He had served in the military for more than 20 years and had recently retired. After retirement he took a civilian job with the Department of Defense and kept supporting his family. He left behind a wife, two adult sons, and a young daughter. He was the sole financial provider for his wife and his minor child.
Marks & Harrison represented the family. Ryan T. Walker and Mike J. Braggs handled the case from the firm's Richmond office, with Bryan L. Meadows working from Fredericksburg. The defense asked for mediation before any suit was filed.
To measure what the family had lost, the attorneys retained economist Dr. Robert W. Cook to calculate the income the veteran would have earned over the rest of his working years. They also commissioned a video from Juris Production Inc. that showed who the man was to his wife, his children, and his friends. That gave the defense both the financial figures and a clear picture of the family at the same table.
The parties reached a $10 million settlement. Because the matter resolved at pre-suit mediation, there was no trial and no verdict, and the amount was not reduced on appeal.
Virginia Lawyers Weekly later listed the recovery among the state's million-dollar-plus settlements of 2024. It was one of five Marks & Harrison results on that year's list, and the firm reported that it ranked as the second-largest personal injury settlement in Virginia for 2024.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Marks & Harrison
All Marks & Harrison proven verdicts →A City of Richmond worker suffered permanent brain damage when a runaway Norfolk Southern boxcar with a missing brake rod drove a floodwall gate into him, and a Richmond jury returned a $10 million verdict.
A heavy retail display toppled onto a 7-year-old, fracturing the child's skull and forcing emergency brain surgery, and Marks & Harrison resolved the premises liability case for $9 million.
In February 2015 a Chesterfield County, Virginia police officer fired a Taser at Miles November, a 27-year-old man trapped in a wrecked car soaked in gasoline after a police chase. His clothing ignited and he suffered burns over most of his body, followed by months in the hospital and more than 30 surgeries. He sued the county and the officer in federal court in Richmond. The case settled in 2018 for $6.5 million, paid by the county's commercial insurer and its self-insurance fund.
Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.