Jury Awards $1.06 Million to Mother Hit by Railcar at Unlit Crossing

A South Dakota jury awarded $1,081,655.28 to a mother and daughter who drove into a stopped railroad flatcar at a Wolsey crossing in January 1998. The award went to Julie and Steve Boomsma and to their daughter Erica, and the South Dakota Supreme Court affirmed it in August 2002.

At about 6:20 p.m. on January 26, 1998, Julie and Erica Boomsma were driving north on Highway 281/14 through Wolsey. It was dark. As they approached the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad crossing, they saw no flashing lights and no one waving a lantern. They could see lights and business signs on the far side of the tracks. Their car struck the side of a flatbed railcar sitting on the elevator service line and came to rest almost completely underneath it.

The crossing had three tracks: a main line, a switching line, and a service line about fifty feet north of the switching line that served a grain elevator. The overhead flashing lights had never been wired to operate when a train was on the service line. For northbound drivers, the only crossbuck sign read '2 Tracks', so nothing told them a third track existed. Southbound drivers were warned of all three. The train's conductor, who was riding the flatcar through the intersection, knew the warning lights were not working. He did not sound the whistle or set out flares, and the railroad and the Boomsmas disputed whether he got off to flag the crossing.

Julie Boomsma, who worked full time at a bank in Huron and helped on the family farm, broke her neck, her right leg and her right ankle. She needed multiple surgeries and was left disabled, unable to take part in many of the activities she had before. Erica, then a freshman at Huron University, suffered a cracked sinus, a concussion and a large bruise on her right side, and has recovered.

Steven Johnson and Matthew T. Tobin of Johnson, Heidepriem, Miner, Marlow and Janklow, a predecessor of today's Johnson Janklow Abdallah firm, represented the Boomsmas. At trial the railroad argued that federal law displaced the state negligence claim, that Julie and Erica were partly at fault for not stopping, and that the plaintiffs' visibility expert should not have been heard. The jury was also asked to consider punitive damages but awarded none. It returned $1,059,873.40 for Julie and Steve Boomsma and $21,781.88 for Erica.

On appeal, the railroad raised preemption, jury instructions, expert testimony, evidence of its post-accident changes, and its request for a mistrial over a mention of settlement talks. The Supreme Court held that federal funds had not paid for adequate warning devices at the service line, which it treated as a separate crossing, so the state claim could go forward. It upheld the instructions and the expert's testimony and affirmed the judgment on August 21, 2002.