Santa Fe Jury Awards $40.5 Million After Student Trucker's Head-On Crash Kills Motorist
After trial: No appeal of the verdict has been reported, and New Mexico had no damages cap for a case like this in 2019, so the $40.5 million appears to have stood as returned. Werner is a large insured carrier, but no source confirms the date or fact of payment.
Won by Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP.
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.
What happened
On the evening of February 23, 2017, around 8 p.m., Kathryn Armijo was driving a Honda Pilot on Interstate 10 outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, when a Werner Enterprises tractor-trailer crossed four lanes of traffic and the median and struck her vehicle head-on. Armijo was pronounced dead at the scene. The truck was driven by Felipe 'Jose' Johnson, a recent graduate of the Werner-owned Roadmaster Drivers School who was in his eighth day of driving for Werner at the time.
Under Werner's student driver program, Johnson's trainer, Gabriel Perez, was required to observe him for at least 30 hours during his first five days on the road, Johnson was required to observe Perez for 10 hours, and Johnson was barred from driving without an instructor present. According to court documents described in trade press coverage of the case, between February 16 and February 23, 2017, Johnson drove roughly 64 percent of the time unsupervised, and within his first four days neither he nor Perez logged any observation time at all.
Armijo's estate brought a wrongful death suit against Werner, Johnson, and Perez, alleging that the company's training and supervision practices reflected a systematic disregard for basic safety policies for new drivers. The complaint alleged that Werner assigned loads whose delivery deadlines left no room for the required observation time, that it was not uncommon for instructors to be asleep while student drivers were at the wheel, and that Werner drivers could become trainers as little as three months after getting a commercial driver's license. David Harris, a partner at Sico Hoelscher Harris LLP, was plaintiff co-counsel for the estate. He told Land Line that Werner's training program was a paper-only system that the company was not fulfilling in practice, and that Werner had argued the crash was a singular accident rather than a sign of any wider problem.
The case was tried over roughly two weeks before a jury in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County. On October 11, 2019, the jury found Werner, Johnson, and Perez negligent and returned a verdict of $40.5 million, including $10 million in punitive damages.
Werner publicly disputed the jury's view of the crash. In a statement issued after the verdict, company president and CEO Derek Leathers said the collision was 'the result of a brief moment of operator error by the Werner driver,' who 'was not distracted, fatigued or impaired in any way,' adding that 'in every sense, it simply was an accident.'
No appeal of the civil verdict has surfaced in available searches, and New Mexico imposes no statutory cap on compensatory or punitive damages in a case of this kind. Werner Enterprises is a large, publicly traded motor carrier that carries liability insurance above a self-insured retention, which is consistent with the judgment being satisfied rather than left uncollected.
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 →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.
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.
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