Miami-Dade Jury Awards Construction Worker $13 Million After Display Panel Collapse Causes Brain Injury
Won by Podhurst Orseck PA.
A Miami-Dade County jury awarded $13 million in November 2022 to Jacinto Tamayo Perez, a construction worker left with a traumatic brain injury and permanent disability when a display panel collapsed on him. The defendants, a Spanish panel manufacturer and Studio Design LLC, had defaulted and did not appear. The award includes $3 million to his wife, who became his full-time caregiver.
What happened
Jacinto Tamayo Perez was a construction worker when a display panel collapsed on top of him, striking him in the head more than once. He came away with a traumatic brain injury and a permanent disability.
He sued two defendants in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court: Tableros De Fibra De La Subbetica SL, a Spanish company that made the panel, and Studio Design LLC. The manufacturer was overseas, so the case had to be served under the Hague Service Convention, the treaty that governs delivering court papers across national borders. Neither defendant appeared or put up a defense, and the court entered a default against them. That meant liability was no longer contested. What remained was the question of how much Perez and his family were owed.
Podhurst Orseck attorney Pablo Rojas represented Perez. In November 2022 the case went to a jury for damages alone. The trial lasted a single day, and the jury returned its verdict in less than an hour.
The jury awarded $13 million in total. It assigned $5 million for Perez's lost earnings and medical expenses, and another $5 million for his pain and suffering. The last $3 million went to his wife for her own emotional damages. After the injury she became his full-time caregiver, and the jury treated that change in her life as a loss separate from his.
Because the defendants never came to court, there was no defense case to answer and no competing account of how the panel came down. The jury heard only the plaintiff's evidence of his damages and set the figures on that record. Reports of the verdict, in the Daily Business Review and elsewhere, did not describe any post-trial motion or appeal by the defendants. Whether the award can be collected from a foreign manufacturer has not been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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