Essex County Jury Returns a $166 Million Verdict Against New Jersey's Child Welfare Agency Over a Baby Left Blind and Brain Damaged by His Father, Then the Largest Injury Verdict in State History, Later Wiped Out on Appeal

On May 28, 2009, Noemi Escobar brought her grandson to the attention of New Jersey's Division of Youth and Family Services. The baby was not yet three months old. She had seen bruises on his face and blood in his eyes, and she believed the father, her teenage daughter's boyfriend, was hurting him. Caseworker Felix Umetiti opened a file that afternoon and met the family at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, where a doctor examined the child and told him he could not rule out abuse.

The Division did not remove the boy. Umetiti visited the home on June 1 and June 12, 2009, and on the second visit put in place a voluntary safety plan built around one condition: the baby was never to be left alone with his father. The plan was set to expire June 30. On July 16, 2009, the mother dropped the baby off at the father's apartment anyway. The father shook the infant and dropped him. The boy survived with catastrophic brain damage. He is blind, cannot walk or talk, and needs medical care around the clock. His father later pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and child abuse and was sentenced to prison.

Escobar, as the boy's guardian, sued the State, the Division, Umetiti, and his supervisor Nussette Perez in Essex County. David Mazie of Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman tried the case over roughly three weeks in November and December 2013, arguing the agency had disregarded a grandmother's warnings and a doctor's findings and left a defenseless infant in reach of the danger she had named. Two days before the verdict, Mazie rejected the State's $10 million settlement offer.

On December 13, 2013, the jury found that leaving the baby in the home was palpably unreasonable, assigned the State 100 percent of the fault, and awarded $105 million for future medical care, $57.67 million for pain and suffering, $1.4 million in lost wages, and $1.9 million for the value of Escobar's care. Judgment entered at $165,972,503. Press accounts called it the largest personal injury verdict in New Jersey history and the largest ever returned against a child protective agency anywhere in the country.

The number did not survive. The trial judge granted the State's remittitur motion in part, cutting the future medical award and reducing the final judgment to $102,630,435.25. Then, on April 4, 2017, the Appellate Division erased even that. In a published opinion, N.E. for J.V. v. State, the panel held the caseworkers were protected by the qualified immunity New Jersey's Tort Claims Act extends to public employees who act in good faith while executing the law, N.J.S.A. 59:3-3. Removing a child from his parents without consent is a judgment call governed by statute, the court reasoned, and ordinary negligence, which was all the jury had been asked to find, is not enough to strip that protection. The panel reversed the verdict and vacated the judgment in full.

Mazie said he would ask the New Jersey Supreme Court to review the ruling. The reversal ended the case against the State, and no part of the $166 million verdict or the remitted $102.6 million judgment was ever collected. The boy's care is supported instead by a separate $7.475 million settlement his guardian reached with his medical providers, a sum the trial court had credited against the verdict when judgment was entered.