$54.1 Million Verdict After Bucket Truck Crossed the Center Line and Killed a Citrus County Driver
Won by Morgan & Morgan.
A Citrus County jury awarded $54.1 million to the family of Jeffery Hindalong, killed when a Freightliner bucket truck driven by a tree-service employee swerved across the center line into his vehicle. Morgan & Morgan partner Jonathan Brozyna and the firm's trial team took the case to verdict after the family turned down a $2 million settlement offer.
What happened
Jeffery Hindalong was driving a Citrus County road in late 2021 when a Freightliner bucket truck coming the other way crossed the center line and struck his vehicle head-on. The truck belonged to a tree service company and was being driven by one of its employees. Hindalong did not survive.
A head-on crash caused by a commercial vehicle drifting into oncoming traffic is about as clear as liability gets, and the defense knew it, the fight was over what Jeffery Hindalong's life was worth to the family he left behind. Before trial, the company's side put $2 million on the table. Morgan & Morgan partner Jonathan Brozyna would later say the offer did not come close to providing justice, and the family turned it down.
That decision put the case in front of a Citrus County jury, in a rural venue not known for runaway verdicts. Morgan & Morgan's trial team built its case around a fact it never ran from: the truck was in the wrong lane, and everything that followed flowed from the company's driver being where he should not have been. As Law.com's Daily Business Review put it in its trial write-up, the plaintiffs' lawyers owned that fact and made the trial about the loss rather than a liability contest.
In December 2025, the jury returned a verdict of $54,128,376.90 for the Hindalong family, roughly 27 times the pre-trial offer. The firm counted it among its biggest results of the year, and the Daily Business Review featured the trial team's approach in its coverage of Florida's year-end verdicts.
Beyond the number, the case is a clean illustration of why commercial trucking cases are tried at all: when a carrier's best offer values a wrongful death at $2 million, the only way to find the real number is to ask twelve jurors. In Citrus County, the answer came back 27 times higher.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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