$26.55 Million Settlement for TruGreen Landscaper Left Quadriplegic by Bald Tire Rollover
Won by Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky.
Robert Mongeluzzi secured a then-record $26.55 million Philadelphia County settlement for David Williams, a TruGreen lawn-care worker who was left quadriplegic after a company truck rolled over on a Clinton County highway due to a bald tire the defendants had failed to replace even after their own inspection flagged it.
What happened
In November 2011, David Williams was driving a TruGreen company pickup truck along a highway in Clinton County, Pennsylvania, when the vehicle rolled over. Williams, who was 32 at the time and lived in Centre County with his wife Jaimi and their three children, suffered a fractured spinal cord. The injury left him a quadriplegic requiring multiple surgeries, an extended stay at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia, and ongoing around-the-clock nursing care including nighttime repositioning.
The central finding in the case was a bald tire. Attorneys for Williams and his wife argued that TruGreen and its parent company ServiceMaster had left the defective tire on the truck unreplaced despite the tire having already failed their own fleet inspection. Dickinson Fleet Services, the company responsible for maintaining the vehicle, and Brooks Auto Repair, which had also serviced the truck, were named alongside TruGreen and ServiceMaster as defendants.
The case was filed and litigated in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Robert Mongeluzzi of Saltz, Mongeluzzi, Barrett and Bendesky led the representation of Williams and his wife, who joined the case as a co-plaintiff. Judge M. Teresa Sarmina approved the settlement reached in June 2016.
The $26.55 million total was divided among the defendants: TruGreen and ServiceMaster paid $16.75 million, Dickinson Fleet Services paid $9.5 million, and Brooks Auto Repair paid $300,000. At the time of the agreement, Philadelphia County's Court of Common Pleas had never seen a larger single personal injury settlement. Williams's projected lifetime medical costs ran into the millions, and the settlement was intended to cover continuous nursing supervision for the remainder of his life.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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