$15 Million Judgment After Five Pit Bulls Kill Oklahoma City Man
Won by McIntyre Law P.C..
A $15 million civil judgment was entered against the owner of five pit bulls that mauled 60-year-old Edgar Brown to death on SW 38th Street in Oklahoma City in October 2015, with Noble McIntyre representing the Brown family.
What happened
On the afternoon of October 6, 2015, Edgar Brown, 60, stopped by a friend's rental home on SW 38th Street in southwest Oklahoma City to take out the trash. Five pit bulls belonging to neighbor Juan Marcos Diaz breached the chain-link fence separating the two properties and attacked him.
The injuries Brown sustained were catastrophic. Doctors amputated both of his legs and part of one arm in attempts to control infection and save his life. He also suffered a heart attack requiring triple bypass surgery. Brown died in the hospital on October 18, 2015, twelve days after the attack. All five dogs were euthanized.
The criminal case moved separately. Diaz was charged with second-degree manslaughter in August 2016, pleaded guilty in November 2017, and was sentenced to one year in prison with three years of probation. He served the sentence and was subsequently deported to Mexico.
Noble McIntyre filed a civil wrongful-death action on behalf of the Brown family. On February 8, 2019, Oklahoma County District Court entered a $15 million judgment against Diaz. McIntyre acknowledged from the outset that Diaz carried no liability insurance and held no attachable assets, making collection effectively impossible. The family pursued the case anyway.
Dexter Brown, Edgar's brother, explained the decision: "You can't have animals go out and kill somebody, tear them to pieces like they did my brother, and nothing happen to you." McIntyre framed the judgment as a statement to dog owners statewide: if an animal escapes and kills someone, the legal and financial consequences fall on the owner, regardless of ability to pay.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KTUL: Oklahoma court hands down $15 million judgment for family of man killed by five dogs·Archived copy
- 2.KOKH Fox 25: Oklahoma court hands down $15 million judgment for family of man killed by five dogs·Archived copy
- 3.News9: Family of OKC man killed in 2015 dog attack reaches $15 million settlement·Archived copy
- 4.DogsBite.org: 2015 Dog Bite Fatality: Oklahoma Man Dies After Vicious Attack by Five Pit Bulls·Archived copy
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.