$1 Million Settlement for Missouri Woman Hit by Tractor-Trailer on I-57 in a Storm
After trial: The terms beyond the reported amount were not made public, and we could not confirm how the settlement was divided or paid. The recovery exhausted the applicable insurance policy limits.
Kathleen Reagan, then 30, was driving a pickup on Interstate 57 near Charleston, Missouri, during a severe storm in July 2016 when a CRC Transport tractor-trailer struck the rear of her vehicle. She later had a cervical fusion. Her federal suit against the company and its driver settled in late 2018 for $1 million, the full amount of the available insurance coverage, after the defense disputed both fault and the need for surgery.
What happened
In July 2016, Kathleen Reagan was driving her pickup truck on Interstate 57 near Charleston, Missouri, when a severe storm moved through. A tractor-trailer driven by Vladimir Zmeu, an employee of CRC Transport LLC, struck the rear of her vehicle. Reagan was 30 years old and in the middle of a move to Texas.
Her neck was the problem. An MRI taken about three weeks after the crash came back normal, according to one radiologist. A discogram, a more invasive test in which a needle places dye into the affected disc, pointed to a different conclusion, and she underwent a fusion of vertebrae in her neck. She continued to have soreness by the end of each day. She is married, has three children, and works as a digital coordinator at an HVAC company.
Reagan and her husband sued CRC Transport and Zmeu in March 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, in a diversity case before Judge Audrey Fleissig. Joshua Myers and Stephen Schultz of Schultz Myers in St. Louis represented her. Steven Hughes of Hughes Lawyers, also in St. Louis, defended the trucking company and its driver.
Liability and causation were both contested. Hughes said a hailstorm had cut visibility for both drivers, and he argued that the post-accident MRI showed nothing unusual for a woman her age and that the medical bills were excessive. He disputed that the driver or the company was responsible for the wreck or for the need for surgery.
Myers prepared to answer with the driver's record. He said Zmeu had three moving violations in the 13 months before the crash, all while driving for CRC Transport, and that it was his first trucking job. Myers also planned to show that the U.S. Department of Transportation had cited the company for numerous safety violations involving its drivers since it was founded in 2013. In his words, the company never disciplined or retrained Zmeu despite that history and its own internal policies, and the plaintiff's side argued the record supported a claim for punitive damages.
The case settled before trial. The court docket was closed on December 13, 2018, and Missouri Lawyers Media reported the settlement at $1 million, which was the limit of the available insurance coverage. The recovery came without a trial against a defense that challenged fault, the storm conditions and the surgery itself.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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