Parents of 6-Year-Old Killed by School Bus Win Wrongful Death Judgment Against Driver in St. Louis
After trial: The judgment against the driver was not appealed or reduced. On the parents' garnishment against the school insurer, the Eastern District affirmed coverage in 2017 but limited that judgment to the policy's remaining limit plus interest and remanded for recalculation.
A six-year-old boy was struck and killed by a North Callaway school bus in January 2011 after getting off at his stop. His parents sued the driver for wrongful death, and after a December 2012 bench trial in St. Louis the court entered judgment for them for $11,494,637.38. The judgment was not appealed. The Eastern District later held the school insurer's policy covered it.
What happened
On January 18, 2011, a school bus driver for the North Callaway R-1 School District in Missouri pulled forward after dropping students off on his afternoon route and struck a six-year-old boy who had not yet crossed the street. The boy died of his injuries. He and his older sister rode the same bus every day, and he usually crossed first while she followed. The driver saw that the sister had crossed and assumed her brother had too. He did not know the bus had hit a child until another student told him to stop.
The boy's parents hired Joshua Myers of Schultz & Myers, who is listed as their counsel in the Eastern District's opinion. They sued the driver for wrongful death in February 2012, alleging, among other things, that he had failed to teach the boy how to leave the bus and cross safely. The case moved through four venues before landing in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis.
The path to trial ran through a dispute over insurance. The driver was covered under a policy issued to the district by the Missouri United School Insurance Council. After he pleaded guilty to second-degree involuntary manslaughter in November 2011 (he later received a suspended sentence with probation), the insurer reserved the right to deny coverage under an exclusion for criminal acts. The family had twice demanded the policy limits and was refused. Faced with a possible loss of coverage, the driver signed a Section 537.065 agreement with the parents, a Missouri device that lets an injured party try the case against the defendant and then look to his insurer, rather than his personal assets, to pay a judgment.
The case was tried to the bench in St. Louis in December 2012. Judge David Dowd found that the driver had an established duty to teach students the school's unloading procedure, which required each child to walk ten steps forward from the front of the bus and wait for a hand signal before crossing, and that he had breached it. The court also stated that the negligence it found was ordinary tort negligence, not criminal negligence. On December 21, 2012, it entered judgment for the parents for $11,494,637.38, with post-judgment interest at 5.25 percent a year.
The parents then garnished the insurer. In January 2015 the trial court held that the policy covered the loss, and in 2015 it entered a garnishment judgment against the insurer that included interest. The insurer appealed, and on February 7, 2017 the Eastern District affirmed coverage, including its finding that the death was an accident within the policy. It cut the garnishment judgment back to the policy's remaining limit plus interest, because no finding of bad faith had yet been made, and sent the interest calculation back to the trial court. The wrongful death judgment against the driver was not appealed or reduced. A separate bad faith suit brought by the driver against the insurer was still pending when the court ruled.
The loss led the firm to start a school bus safety campaign built around the instruction to wait before crossing, and its partners have traveled across Missouri to tell the boy's story to school staff.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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