$301 Billion Dram-Shop Verdict Against a Closed Bar, the Largest Jury Award Ever Recorded
After trial: Largely symbolic award. The bar closed in 2019 and the family said it expected to collect nothing; the verdict was sought as a public statement against drunk driving.
Won by Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP.
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
What happened
On the night of November 12, 2017, Tamra Kay Kindred, a 59-year-old Corpus Christi grandmother, was driving home after picking up her 16-year-old granddaughter from the girl's job at a pizza restaurant. Minutes earlier, a few blocks away, 29-year-old Joshua Delbosque had walked out of Beer Belly's Sports Bar, where the lawsuit later showed he had been served roughly eleven alcoholic drinks. Delbosque ran a red light at 91 miles per hour and slammed into their car. Kindred and her granddaughter were killed. So was Delbosque, whose blood alcohol level was measured at .263, more than three times the Texas legal limit.
Kindred's daughters, Jennifer Kindred and Elizabeth Anderson, the teenager's mother, sued the bar and its owner under the Texas Dram Shop Act, which holds alcohol providers liable for serving an obviously intoxicated customer. Their suit alleged that Beer Belly's kept pouring for Delbosque long past the point where any server following Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission rules would have cut him off, then let him drive away.
John Flood of Corpus Christi's Flood Trial Lawyers led the family's trial team, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel. By the time the case reached a Nueces County jury in December 2021, the defendant was in a real sense already gone: Beer Belly's had closed in 2019. In closing arguments, Craig Sico of Sico, Hoelscher & Harris put the question to the jurors directly. He showed them the largest verdicts that had ever been returned for other families and told them they needed to decide how loud their own voice was going to be heard.
On December 7, 2021, the jury answered with a number no American jury had ever reached before: $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages against Beer Belly's and its owner, about $301.04 billion in all. News reports called it the largest jury verdict ever recorded, eclipsing the previous record, a $150 billion award that had also come from a Nueces County jury a decade earlier.
What the number means has to be stated plainly, because the family stated it plainly themselves. Nobody involved expected the judgment to be paid. The bar was closed, Texas does not require bar owners to carry any minimum liquor liability insurance, and the family's lawyers acknowledged the former owners had nothing close to the assets to satisfy it. Elizabeth Anderson said the family did not expect a single dollar from the win. Flood said the point was accountability: that Beer Belly's had traded money for the safety of its patrons and the public by continuing to serve an obviously intoxicated customer, and that the verdict should stand as a warning to every bar that does the same. Sico said there is no justification for alcohol servers to blatantly ignore TABC rules designed to protect the public.
So the record holds a strange pair of facts: the largest jury verdict in history, and a family that asked for it knowing it was uncollectable. What the trial actually delivered was not money but a formal public reckoning, entered by twelve jurors on the record of a Texas court, of what one bar's eleven drinks cost one grandmother and one sixteen-year-old girl on her way home from work.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP
All Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP proven verdicts →In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
On February 23, 2017, a Werner Enterprises student driver on his eighth day behind the wheel crossed four lanes of Interstate 10 and the median outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, and struck Kathryn Armijo's vehicle head-on, killing her. Her estate sued Werner, the driver, and the driver's trainer over inadequate training and supervision, and a Santa Fe County jury returned a $40.5 million verdict on October 11, 2019, including $10 million in punitive damages. David Harris, a partner at Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP, was plaintiff co-counsel for the estate. No appeal of the verdict has surfaced, and Werner, a large publicly traded and insured motor carrier, is treated as having satisfied the judgment.
On October 10, 2005, a Los Paisanos Autobuses van slid off an icy highway near Denver, Colorado at 70 miles per hour, flipped, and struck a concrete embankment, killing two passengers and injuring five others. A Texas jury in the 327th District Court in El Paso County found the bus company and its driver negligent for operating a van with bald tires and inaccessible seatbelts while the driver ate and drove too fast for the weather, and on December 3, 2010 returned a verdict of more than $124 million. Los Paisanos appealed, and while the appeal was pending the parties settled; in July 2012 the Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso reversed the trial court's judgment and rendered a new judgment of $5,000,000, divided among fifteen plaintiffs on a pro rata basis under the settlement. David E. Harris of the firm now known as Sico Hoelscher Harris represented the plaintiffs and told a local business paper after the verdict that he could not promise the family would ever collect the full amount the jury awarded.
Related car accident verdicts
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.