$3 Million Settlement After Interstate Rear-End Crash Ejects Stranded Driver
Won by Marks & Harrison.
A 22-year-old worker creeping along a West Virginia interstate on a flat tire was rear-ended and thrown from his vehicle, and Marks & Harrison resolved the case for $3 million.
What happened
A 22-year-old man from Indiana was working in West Virginia and driving back to his hotel with a coworker when one of his tires went flat on the interstate. He swapped the flat for the spare donut, and before long that tire failed too. With no place he felt he could safely pull off, he kept the car creeping along at about 9 mph on the bare rim, hazard lights flashing, hoping to reach an exit.
Another vehicle came up behind him and struck the rear of his car. The force of the collision threw him out of the vehicle and onto the roadway. He was taken to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, with extensive injuries, and during his hospitalization he needed multiple surgeries.
He sued the driver who hit him in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Beckley Division. Fault was contested from the start. The defense argued that the plaintiff brought much of the harm on himself by driving on a flat donut at an extremely low speed on a live interstate, instead of getting off the road or waiting on the shoulder for help. Under West Virginia's comparative fault rules, a jury that assigned the plaintiff a large enough share of the blame could have reduced his recovery or cut it off entirely.
Richmond attorneys John C. Shea, Tara A. Enix, and Roger T. Creager of Marks & Harrison pressed the opposite reading of the facts. A slow car with its hazard lights on was plainly there to be seen on the roadway, and the driver coming up behind carried a duty to keep a proper lookout and to avoid striking what was in front of him. To get a jury ready for the medicine and the mechanics of the crash, the team prepared medical illustrations and other demonstrative exhibits, then tested its themes with a focus group before any trial.
The two sides went to mediation with Doug Adkins of Cyrus & Adkins in Huntington and reached terms before a verdict. Because the figure was negotiated rather than handed down by a jury, it was not subject to later appeal, reduction, or remittitur. Virginia Lawyers Weekly listed the result among the year's million-dollar-plus settlements and credited the Richmond trial team. The settlement totaled $3 million.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.