$728,218 Jury Verdict After Jackknifed Tractor-Trailer Hits Cargo Van on Gene Snyder Freeway
Won by Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers.
Jonathan Hollan of Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers won a $728,218 jury verdict for a plaintiff whose cargo van was struck when a tractor-trailer jackknifed during rush-hour traffic on Louisville's Gene Snyder Freeway.
What happened
Rush-hour traffic on Louisville's Gene Snyder Freeway came to a violent halt when a tractor-trailer jackknifed, sending its empty trailer swinging into adjacent lanes. The plaintiff, driving a cargo van, had no time to avoid the collision. The impact knocked the van across multiple lanes of traffic.
The plaintiff suffered cervical, lumbar, and hip injuries. Chronic pain complaints followed, requiring ongoing treatment. The case turned on the severity and permanence of those injuries, along with the liability picture presented by a jackknifing big rig in heavy commuter traffic.
Jonathan Hollan of Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers, Louisville, handled the case for the plaintiff. The defense was led by Daniel C. Mack and R. Craig Reinhardt of Reinhardt and Associates, Lexington. Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Susan Gibson presided.
The jury returned a verdict of $728,218 in November 2023. The parties had entered a confidential Hi-Lo agreement, meaning the actual recovery was bounded within a pre-set range regardless of the jury's number, with the verdict falling within those limits.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.