King County Jury Awards $165 Million to Eight Former Sky Valley School Employees Over PCB Exposure

Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, Washington, was outfitted for decades with fluorescent light fixtures whose ballasts contained polychlorinated biphenyls, an industrial chemical class that Monsanto manufactured under the trade name Aroclor. PCBs were banned for most uses in 1979, but the ballasts continued to leach the chemicals into classroom and building air long after that. Eight people who worked at the school, most of them teachers along with a custodian, alleged years of occupational exposure caused them serious health problems.

The plaintiffs filed suit in King County Superior Court against Pharmacia LLC, the corporate successor that inherited Monsanto's chemical liabilities when Monsanto was spun off from Pharmacia in 2002. The case was captioned Heit et al. v. Pharmacia LLC, Case No. 18-2-55641-4. One plaintiff, Sandra Johnson, died before the verdict; her estate remained in the case.

The trial team for the plaintiffs included Colleen Durkin Peterson of Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala, working alongside Richard Friedman, Henry Jones, Sean Gamble, and Ronald Park of Friedman Rubin PLLP and Nicholas Rowley and Courtney Rowley of Trial Lawyers for Justice. Plaintiffs argued Pharmacia knew for decades that PCBs were toxic and bio-accumulative yet continued to sell the product and failed to warn buyers of the health risks to people in the buildings where it was installed.

On November 20, 2023, after deliberations, the jury returned a verdict totaling $165,082,000. The jury assigned $49.8 million in compensatory damages and $115.3 million in punitive damages. The estate of Sandra Johnson received $29.5 million of the total award.

Pharmacia indicated through a Monsanto spokesperson that it intended to appeal, noting that a prior appeal in a related Sky Valley employee case could affect the outcome. In a separate Sky Valley employee case involving different plaintiffs (Erickson v. Pharmacia), a verdict of more than $185 million was reversed by the Washington Court of Appeals in 2024 on choice-of-law grounds, but the Washington Supreme Court reinstated that verdict on October 30, 2025, holding that Missouri law governed the punitive-damages and repose questions. The appellate status of the Heit verdict itself had not been publicly resolved as of mid-2026, and the award had not been reported as reduced or remitted by the trial court.

The $165 million verdict was among the largest in a sequence of King County jury awards across more than a dozen trials arising from PCB contamination at the same school, with combined verdicts in the Sky Valley litigation exceeding $1 billion against the Monsanto successor entities.