DeKalb County Jury Awards $5.47 Million After Dump Truck Kills Airport Construction Spotter

On June 14, 2007, Mack Pitts was working as a spotter directing dump trucks at a construction site at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where crews were building the airport's international terminal. Spotters were stationed at the site so that drivers backing loaded dump trucks toward the fill area would not back into a worker they could not see behind them. Sarah Okoro, driving a dump truck owned by her employer, A & G Trucking, Inc., pulled onto the site while several other trucks were lined up waiting their turn.

According to the trial record, Okoro bypassed the waiting trucks and moved to back up without waiting for a signal from Pitts, as site rules required. Pitts flagged her with a stop signal and she paused, then he turned to direct another driver, not realizing Okoro had started backing toward him. Other drivers in line began honking to warn her that Pitts was behind her truck. Okoro responded with an obscene gesture and kept backing up at a good rate of speed. By the time Pitts realized what was happening, he could not get out of the truck's path in time. He died of his injuries.

Pitts's children and his estate sued Okoro and A & G Trucking for wrongful death in the State Court of DeKalb County. They initially raised claims for punitive damages and for A & G's negligent hiring, retention, and supervision of Okoro, but dropped both before opening statements, leaving the case to be tried on ordinary negligence. At trial, testimony established that Okoro had violated multiple written safety rules for dump truck drivers at the site, including entering the field before being signaled, failing to stay stopped once the spotter told her to, and backing up without confirming where the spotter was standing. Okoro did not dispute breaking the rules. Her defense was that doing so matched how she and other drivers had operated at the site for years.

The trial also exposed a separate problem for A & G. During cross-examination, plaintiffs' counsel confronted Okoro with what the company had produced as her employment application, which described prior truck-driving experience contradicting her testimony. Okoro said she had never seen the document and that the signature on it was not hers. A & G's own principal testified that the application had not been filled out by Okoro at all: her name was misspelled, the signature was someone else's, and a manager had filled the form out for her during a workers' compensation audit after the company misplaced her real application.

On October 23, 2009, the jury returned a verdict of $5,470,000 for the Pitts family. A & G Trucking and Okoro appealed, but on a narrow ground: that the trial court should not have let the family's lawyers question Okoro about the disputed employment application. Alan J. Hamilton, then with Butler, Wooten & Fryhofer and now a partner at Shiver Hamilton Campbell, was counsel of record for the Pitts family on the appeal, along with James P. Sneed. On November 5, 2010, the Georgia Court of Appeals rejected the appeal and affirmed the verdict in full, holding that the trial court had discretion to allow the cross-examination.

The $5.47 million judgment did not translate into a full recovery. A separate Georgia Supreme Court opinion issued in 2012, arising from a follow-on lawsuit the family brought against the airport's general contractor and subcontractors over required insurance coverage, noted that A & G Trucking apparently could not pay the judgment against it. That follow-on contract case, which did not touch the wrongful-death verdict itself, went back to the Georgia Court of Appeals in 2013, which found the construction companies, though not the City of Atlanta, had breached their contractual duty to make sure A & G carried adequate insurance before it was allowed to work on the site.