St. Charles County Jury Awards $75 Million to the Parents of a 21-Year-Old Killed by a Driver Fleeing Police
After trial: The judgment is effectively uncollectable: Richardson is imprisoned, and no insurer or institutional defendant remains in the case.
Won by O'Brien Law Firm, P.C..
A St. Charles County jury awarded $75 million, including $25 million in punitive damages, to the parents of Krystofer Batsell, a 21-year-old killed when a driver fleeing police at more than 100 mph crashed into his car. The defendant is serving a 15-year prison sentence for second-degree murder, and the judgment is effectively uncollectable.
What happened
Late in the afternoon of November 17, 2018, Krystofer Batsell was driving his 2002 Ford Focus along Cedar Glen Drive in St. Charles County, Missouri. He was 21 years old, a young writer who covered rock music. Aron Richardson was coming the other way in a 1998 Dodge Durango at more than 100 miles per hour, running from a St. Charles County police officer who had tried to stop him. Richardson slammed into Batsell's car and killed him.
The criminal case resolved first. Richardson, who was under the influence when he fled the stop, pleaded guilty in 2020 to second-degree murder, resisting arrest, possession of a controlled substance, and driving while intoxicated. He received a 15-year prison sentence.
Batsell's parents, Kenneth and Connie Batsell, then pressed the civil side. Their wrongful death suit originally reached beyond Richardson to the pursuit itself, but a judge ruled that the officer and St. Charles County were not liable for the chase. That decision left Richardson, an imprisoned man with no meaningful assets, as the only defendant at trial. The family went forward anyway. Grant Boyd of the O'Brien Law Firm tried the case along with co-counsel J.C. Pleban of Pleban & Associates.
In November 2023, almost five years to the day after the crash, a St. Charles County jury heard the evidence and deliberated for about an hour. It returned a verdict of $75 million: $50 million in actual damages and $25 million in punitive damages.
The number deserves a plain statement about what it is and what it is not. Richardson is in a Missouri prison. There is no insurer standing behind a judgment of this size for a driver who killed someone while fleeing police, and no corporate or governmental defendant remained in the case. The Batsell family will almost certainly never collect any meaningful part of the award. What the verdict did was put the community's judgment of the crash on the record, at full weight, after the claims against the county were closed off.
That record mattered to the family for reasons beyond money. In the years after their son's death, the Batsells spoke publicly about police pursuit policies in Missouri, arguing that a high-speed chase over a traffic stop was not worth an innocent driver's life. Their attorneys said in a statement after the verdict that "the voice of the people of St. Charles has finally been heard."
The jury delivered its award in the same county where the crash happened, in the week of the fifth anniversary of Krystofer Batsell's death.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KSDK: St. Charles County jury awards family of man killed by DWI suspect fleeing police $75 million
- 2.Missouri Lawyers Media: Kenneth and Connie Batsell v. Aron Richardson (verdict report)
- 3.St. Louis Post-Dispatch: St. Charles Co. jury delivers $75 million verdict to family of man killed by fleeing driver
- 4.St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Driver who fled St. Charles County police and caused deadly crash gets 15-year prison term
- 5.First Alert 4 (KMOV): Family awarded $75 million in fatal DUI crash
More proven verdicts from O'Brien Law Firm, P.C.
All O'Brien Law Firm, P.C. proven verdicts →A St. Charles County judge entered a $300 million bench-trial judgment for a child, identified only as G.T., who was physically and sexually abused between the ages of three and five while in the care of Susan and James McLaurie, though one defendant died before the suit was filed and the only known insurance was a $303,000 policy.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and the honest frame is that it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The honest frame: the award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.