Flagler County Jury Awards $8.64 Million to Trucker Hurt in I-95 Overturn Crash
Won by Pajcic & Pajcic.
A Flagler County jury awarded trucker Jo'Relle Deleston $8.64 million after a TDC Transportation truck drifted out of its lane and back across I-95 into him, flipping his rig and breaking his neck.
What happened
On October 5, 2022, Jo'Relle Deleston was driving his rig south on Interstate 95, about a mile past the Palm Coast exit in Flagler County. A commercial truck operated for TDC Transportation Inc. came up alongside him, drifted off the road, then jerked hard back across the pavement and into his lane. Deleston's truck rolled several times. A dashcam recorded the whole sequence.
He broke his neck in the crash and suffered other injuries. Deleston, who served six years in the Army before he started driving, lost his job afterward. The dashcam video became hard for him to watch, because the footage sets off the kind of stress response he carried home from his military service. The clip is left frozen just before the moment of impact rather than played all the way through to the rollover. He now drives in a state of heightened alertness, and his recovery has run on two tracks at once, the physical and the psychological.
"That is the last time in Jo'Relle's life he would ever be normal again," his attorney, Curry Pajcic, said, describing that instant on the dashcam. Deleston has said his focus since the crash has been on his recovery and on his family, his wife and their three boys, not on a dollar figure.
Pajcic & Pajcic tried the case in Flagler County Circuit Court and named both the driver and TDC Transportation as defendants. The firm tied the carrier to the crash on the principle that a trucking company answers for the drivers it puts on the road. The dashcam footage anchored the account of how the truck left its line and swung back across into Deleston's path.
On May 26, 2026, roughly three and a half years after the crash, the jury returned a verdict of $8.64 million against the driver and the company. "It sends the message that when trucking companies and reckless drivers harm Floridians, they will be held accountable and responsible for what they did," Pajcic said. The award stood at $8.64 million, and no post-trial reduction or appeal had been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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