$39 Million Verdict for Teen Who Lost an Arm and Leg to a Drag Racer
After trial: Net of fault: the jury placed 60 percent of fault on the defaulted driver and 40 percent on Heller, so under N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.3 Heller owed only its share, about $15.6 million.
Won by Nagel Rice, LLP.
A Middlesex County jury awarded $39 million on February 1, 2019 to Hussein Agiz, who was 18 when a drag racing car struck his motorcycle inside the Heller Industrial Parks complex in Edison, costing him his right arm and right leg. Jurors had earlier found Heller 40 percent at fault for tolerating years of documented drag racing on its property. Under New Jersey law Heller owed its 40 percent share, about $15.6 million, and the case later settled on appeal for an undisclosed amount.
What happened
On the night of July 12, 2012, eighteen-year-old Hussein Agiz rode his motorcycle into the Heller Industrial Parks complex in Edison, New Jersey, a property with more than nine million square feet of warehouse space and dozens of tenants. Street racers had turned its roads into an after-hours drag strip. That night a car driven by Jonathan Bonilla, racing another vehicle on Saw Mill Pond Road, collided with Agiz.
The injuries were severe. Agiz arrived at the hospital with his right arm completely severed and his right leg nearly so, along with a brain contusion and bleeding in one of the ventricles. Surgeons could not save either limb. He underwent eleven surgeries during a five-week hospitalization, then spent roughly three months in inpatient rehabilitation. He testified at trial that he lives with phantom pain in his missing arm all the time.
Agiz sued Heller in 2013. The theory was simple: this was no isolated intrusion. In the three years before the crash, Edison police had filed roughly thirty-five incident reports documenting drag racing inside the complex, and the property owner had failed to stop it. In 2016, after an eight-day trial, a jury agreed, finding Heller 40 percent at fault and Bonilla 60 percent.
But the damages portion of that first verdict went sideways. The jury awarded $4,355,515 for future medical care and $2,301,313 for pain and suffering, an oddly uneven figure that signaled the jurors had improperly discounted noneconomic damages to present value, something New Jersey law forbids. The trial court ordered a new trial on pain and suffering damages only, and in May 2018 the Appellate Division affirmed, noting that improper discounting was the only logical explanation for the anomalous number.
That set up the February 2019 retrial before Judge Michael V. Cresitello Jr. in Middlesex County. Bruce Nagel and Andrew L. O'Connor of Nagel Rice presented the full picture of what a lifetime without a right arm and right leg means for a man who was a teenager when he lost them. On February 1, 2019, after about three hours of deliberation, the jury returned $39 million for pain and suffering. TopVerdict ranked it the second largest jury verdict in New Jersey that year Because the jury placed Heller under 60 percent at fault and assigned Agiz none, New Jersey law (N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.3) limited Heller to its 40 percent share, about $15.6 million of the $39 million award; the defaulted driver owed the rest.
Heller appealed again. Rather than test the award a second time before the Appellate Division, the parties resolved the case: it settled on appeal for an undisclosed amount, closing out litigation that had run nearly seven years.
Agiz, for his part, refused to let the crash define what came next. He earned a golf scholarship for amputees, kept up with friends and sports, and pursued an engineering degree with plans to put it to work for people with disabilities. At the first trial he told the jury about the small things still out of reach, like tying a shoe or putting on a watch. The second jury needed three hours to decide what those losses were worth.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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