GM Settles Wrongful Death Case for Father of Five Killed by Defective Ignition Switch
Won by Pribanic & Pribanic.
Victor Pribanic secured a confidential settlement for the family of James Yingling III, a 35-year-old father of five who died after his Saturn Ion lost steering and braking when a defective GM ignition switch cut power to critical safety systems.
What happened
In November 2013, James Yingling III was driving to work near his Pennsylvania home when his Saturn Ion abruptly lost power steering, power brakes, and airbag functionality. Unable to control the vehicle, Yingling ran off the road into a culvert about two miles from his house. He spent 17 days in a coma before dying of his injuries. He was 35 years old and left behind a wife, Nadia, and five children.
The crash traced back to a defective ignition switch that GM had known about since at least 2005, a fact the company concealed from federal regulators from 2012 through 2014. Testing of the switch in the Yingling vehicle showed it was 'well below the company's performance specifications' and that the car was 'unreasonably dangerous.' GM's own engineers had documented the failure mode years before Yingling's death.
Victor Pribanic of Pribanic and Pribanic represented the Yingling family in the federal multidistrict litigation consolidated before U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan, captioned In re General Motors LLC Ignition Switch Litigation, 14-MD-2543. The Yingling case was designated the third of six bellwether trials chosen to test how juries would respond to the core liability facts across the broader MDL.
Judge Furman set the trial for May 2016. As the date approached, pretrial filings detailed what jurors would hear: testimony from Nadia Yingling and the couple's eldest son, along with expert analysis of the switch failure. On April 8, 2016, GM and the Yingling family reached a confidential settlement. The agreement was disclosed to the court by letter on April 11, 2016, canceling the trial days before it was scheduled to begin.
The terms were not made public. The settlement resolved a case that had been closely watched by plaintiffs and defendants across hundreds of other pending GM ignition switch claims, given its status as the third bellwether in a litigation that would ultimately touch millions of vehicles and years of corporate concealment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.