Family of Man Killed by Turnpike Guardrail Settles Claims for $9.75 Million
After trial: The $9.75 million settlement with four defendants was negotiated, not a verdict, so no cap or remittitur applies, and it is treated as paid. A separate claim against the guardrail manufacturer was dismissed before trial, and a motion to reopen it has no reported outcome.
Won by Nagel Rice, LLP.
Patrick Sweeney, a 34-year-old computer salesman, was killed in August 2006 when the car service driving him to Newark Liberty International Airport lost control on the New Jersey Turnpike near the Route 80 interchange in Bergen County and struck a guardrail that pierced the passenger compartment. His widow, Kristin Sweeney, sued the contractor that built the guardrail, the engineering firms involved in its design and oversight, and the limousine company, arguing the guardrail had not been built to the specifications required by its design. Attorney Bruce Nagel represented the family. After a three-year fight the case settled in 2009 for a combined $9.75 million paid by four defendants, $4 million of it in a settlement with the contractor and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. A separate, previously dismissed claim against the guardrail's end-terminal manufacturer, Trinity Highway Industries, was not part of the settlement.
What happened
In August 2006, Patrick Sweeney, a 34-year-old computer salesman from Pearl River, New York, was riding in a black car service toward Newark Liberty International Airport for a business trip. Heading south on the New Jersey Turnpike near the Route 80 interchange in Bergen County, the driver lost control of the car, which left the roadway and struck a guardrail. Instead of redirecting the vehicle, the guardrail perforated and punctured the passenger compartment and killed Sweeney.
Sweeney's widow, Kristin Sweeney, sued the parties responsible for the guardrail's design, construction and oversight, along with Air Brook Limousine, the company that employed the driver. The guardrail had not been built to the specifications in its design plans: those plans called for it to sit six feet farther from the roadway, but it had instead been installed flush with a raised curb because of the terrain. Bruce Nagel, who represented the family, argued that the guardrail was installed too close to the road, that it should never have been built on top of such a high curb, and that Sweeney would have survived if it had been built as designed.
After a three-year fight, the case settled in October 2009 for a combined $9.75 million. The family reached a $4 million settlement with J. Fletcher Creamer & Son, the Hackensack contractor that built the guardrail, and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. Air Brook Limousine paid $2.9 million. Maitra Associates, the engineering firm the state hired in connection with the guardrail work, paid $2.25 million, and DMJM Harris, the design engineer, paid $600,000.
The Turnpike Authority declined to comment on the case when the settlement was reported, citing pending litigation. Nagel said the guardrail had been a safety hazard from the day it was built, that his side had proved it should have been fixed, and that three years later it still had not been. According to Nagel, photographs his office took that year, three years after the crash, showed no change had been made to the placement of the guardrail.
A separate claim in the case, against Trinity Highway Industries, the manufacturer of the guardrail's impact-absorbing end terminal, had been dismissed before trial and was not part of the $9.75 million settlement with the other four defendants. After a whistleblower case in Texas accused Trinity of concealing a 2005 design change to that same end-terminal product, Nagel Rice asked a Bergen County judge to reopen the dismissed claim, arguing Trinity had fraudulently concealed information relevant to the case. No independent source confirms how that motion was resolved.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Nagel Rice, LLP
All Nagel Rice, LLP proven verdicts →Nicholas Dephillips, a 21-year-old apprentice electrician, fell about 15 feet through a drop ceiling while installing wiring for a helipad atop Newark's Prudential Center in January 2019, fracturing his cervical spine and leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. He sued his employer, Mehl Electric, general contractor Phelps Construction Group, and the arena in Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex County. In September 2021, before trial, he settled with Mehl Electric and its insurance carriers for $21 million, a figure his attorney called the largest construction site accident settlement in New Jersey at the time. His claims against Phelps went to trial in 2025, where a jury apportioned Phelps 36 percent of the liability, adding to his overall recovery from the incident.
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.
A New Jersey jury awarded $6,000,000 after finding that a colorectal surgeon's failure to remove a polyp let a patient's colon cancer go undetected until it had spread to his liver. Benjamin Serico died of the cancer while the case was pending, and his wife Lucia Serico carried it to trial as executrix of his estate. While the jury was deliberating, the parties struck a high-low agreement that guaranteed the family a minimum recovery and capped the surgeon's total exposure at $1,000,000. Because the verdict exceeded that ceiling, judgment entered at $1,000,000. Both the New Jersey Appellate Division and the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the agreement controlled and that no attorney's fees could be added on top of it.
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.