Willis Family Wrongful Death Settlement: $100 Million After Six Children Killed in I-94 Truck Crash
After trial: This was a settlement, not a jury verdict. The case never went to trial: the Willis family and the defendants settled the wrongful death claims for $100 million in 1999.
Won by Power Rogers LLP.
Power Rogers LLP recovered $100 million for Rev. Scott and Janet Willis after six of their nine children were killed when a mudflap assembly fell from a tractor-trailer on I-94 and ignited their minivan, a case that ultimately exposed an Illinois license-bribery scheme and sent Governor George Ryan to federal prison.
What happened
On November 8, 1994, Reverend Duane Scott Willis and his wife Janet were driving their nine children south on Interstate 94 near Milwaukee when a mudflap and taillight assembly broke free from a passing tractor-trailer. The metal piece lodged beneath their minivan, punctured the gas tank, and sparked a fire that engulfed the vehicle within seconds. Six of the Willis children, ranging in age from infant to 13 years old, were killed. Scott and Janet survived but suffered serious burns.
The Willises retained Joseph A. Power Jr. and Larry Rogers Jr. of Power Rogers LLP to pursue the wrongful death claims. The litigation named the truck driver, the trucking company, the minivan manufacturer, and several other defendants, including a mix of corporations and individuals. Investigators found two overlapping problems: the minivan's fuel system was defectively designed, and the truck's hardware had not been properly maintained or secured.
As the civil case moved forward, a separate criminal investigation began to surface. The truck driver had obtained his commercial license through a bribery scheme run through the office of Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan. Employees in Ryan's office accepted cash payments from applicants who could not pass the required tests, then issued licenses to drivers who had no business operating commercial vehicles. The Willis crash brought public attention to that scheme and accelerated the criminal inquiry.
Power later described how the trucking company's insurer initially refused to pay even its policy limits, saying the company owed nothing. Rather than settle for less, the firm tracked down nine or ten separate defendants and pressed each one. By August 1999, all had settled. The aggregate recovery reached $100 million, paid across the multiple defendants, none of whom admitted fault.
The criminal investigation that the crash helped ignite, known as Operation Safe Road, ultimately produced dozens of convictions. George Ryan, by then the sitting Governor of Illinois, was indicted on racketeering and fraud charges related to the licensing bribery scheme, among other corruption allegations. He was convicted in 2006 and began serving a six-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence in 2007.
For the Willis family, the settlement provided financial security but not relief from grief. Scott and Janet Willis have spoken publicly over the years about their faith and the 15 grandchildren born after the crash. Power Rogers LLP has described the case as one of the most significant it has handled, not only for the dollar amount but for the accountability it eventually produced.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.