Baltimore Jury Awards $436K After Woman Is Dragged by Light Rail Car at Patapsco Station
A Baltimore City jury awarded $436,211.75 to the estate of Toni L. Hoffman after finding the Maryland Transit Administration negligent for a 2014 incident in which closing light rail doors trapped her arm and dragged her roughly 20 feet along a station platform.
What happened
On the afternoon of July 11, 2014, Toni L. Hoffman was stepping off a Maryland Transit Administration light rail car at the Patapsco Avenue Station in Baltimore. As she exited, the car's doors began closing before she had cleared them. Her left arm became trapped, and the train moved forward approximately 20 feet with her arm caught inside, dragging her down the platform before she was freed.
Hoffman, who was 51 years old at the time, suffered a fractured left ankle, lacerations, and a possible rotator cuff tear as a result of the incident. Her attorneys at Saiontz and Kirk, P.A. filed suit on her behalf against the MTA, arguing the agency's operators failed to confirm the platform was clear before the train departed.
Hoffman died of causes unrelated to the accident in June 2018, while the case was pending. The lawsuit was amended to proceed on behalf of her estate, with claims focused on the physical harm she sustained in the four years between the incident and her death.
The case went to trial in Baltimore City Circuit Court before Judge Sylvester B. Cox. The jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes before returning a unanimous verdict in favor of the estate. Jurors found the MTA negligent and assigned no contributory negligence to Hoffman. They awarded $36,211.75 to cover her documented medical expenses and $400,000 in noneconomic damages, for a total of $436,211.75.
The verdict was returned on December 10, 2018. No appeal reduction has been reported. E. Steven Nichols of Saiontz and Kirk handled the case for the plaintiff.
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.