$32.5 Million Verdict, Affirmed on Appeal, Over a Jackknifed Semi Left in the Median Without Warning Triangles

On the night of January 17, 2006, Terry Brown Jr. was driving a semi tractor-trailer for J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc. on Interstate 65 in Jasper County, Indiana. Snow was falling and the road was slick. Brown lost control of the truck, and it jackknifed and came to rest disabled in the median, blocking no travel lane directly but sitting close enough to the highway to be a hazard in low visibility.

What happened next was, according to the case, as much about what did not happen as what did. Truck drivers are required to place reflective warning triangles around a disabled vehicle to alert approaching traffic, particularly critical at night in snow, when a dark shape in the median can be nearly invisible until a driver is on top of it. Brown did not place them.

About an hour after Brown's truck went off the road, a car driven by Matthew Robinson, with Kristen Zak riding as a passenger, was traveling the same stretch of I-65. Robinson's car struck the wrecked semi. Zak suffered serious and permanent brain damage in the collision.

Zak, acting through a guardian because of the severity of her injuries, sued J.B. Hunt Transport and Brown in Lake Superior Court. The case did not dispute that Robinson's car struck a truck that had already crashed once that night. It turned on why the truck was still sitting there, unmarked, an hour later, and whether Brown's failure to warn oncoming traffic after his own crash made J.B. Hunt and its driver responsible for what happened to the people in the next car that came along.

The litigation stretched on for roughly nine years before it reached a jury. Zak's trial team, Todd Schafer of Schafer & Schafer, presented evidence on both how Brown's excessive speed for the snowy conditions caused his own crash and why the missing warning triangles turned that first crash into a second one. The jury agreed that both drivers bore responsibility for what happened to Zak, but assigned the larger share to J.B. Hunt and Brown: 60 percent, against 40 percent for Robinson. On the damages side, the jury found Zak's brain injury warranted $32.5 million.

J.B. Hunt and Brown appealed, challenging multiple aspects of the verdict and the size of the award. A three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals was not persuaded by any of it. Writing for the court, Judge John Baker affirmed the trial court's judgment in full, leaving the $32.5 million verdict intact.

The case became a frequently cited example in trucking litigation of how a first, non-injury crash can generate a second, catastrophic one when a carrier's driver does not follow basic post-crash warning procedures, and of how Indiana's comparative fault system can still hold a trucking company primarily responsible even when it did not cause the collision that injured the plaintiff directly.