Fayette County Jury Awards $150.37 Billion After Fatal Gasoline Attack on an 8-Year-Old

On June 28, 1998, his eighth birthday, a boy in Splendora, Texas, was walking through a wooded area between neighborhoods when a 13-year-old neighbor, Don Wilburn Collins, threw gasoline in his face, tied him to a tree with fishing line, poured more gasoline on him, and set him on fire. According to the family's attorney and a later account published by the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, Collins had sexually assaulted the boy in the same area about two weeks earlier, on June 14, 1998, and told several people afterward that he was afraid the boy would tell someone.

The boy suffered third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body. He was treated at Shriners Burns Hospital in Galveston and underwent more than 150 operations in the years that followed. Doctors did not expect him to survive the initial injury, but he lived nearly 13 more years before dying on April 29, 2011, at age 20, of a skin cancer his family and treating physicians attributed to the burns.

Collins was briefly detained as a juvenile after the attack but was released without charges, and the case sat unprosecuted for years. The boy's parents, who had since moved about 100 miles west to Fayette County, sued Collins there in 2010, and the case was tried in December 2011. Collins did not appear for trial and no lawyer appeared on his behalf, so the two-day trial proceeded on the family's evidence alone, including a videotaped deposition the boy gave shortly before he died, naming Collins as his attacker.

On December 20, 2011, the Fayette County jury in La Grange returned a verdict of $150.37 billion, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Of that total, $370 million was actual damages to the boy's estate and his parents. The remainder, roughly $150 billion, was punitive damages assessed against Collins personally.

Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family without charge, told reporters at the time that the family never expected to collect on the judgment. Collins had no assets, and by the date of the verdict he was in Texas state prison: he had been convicted in 2001 of sexually assaulting another 8-year-old boy, and was serving time for failing to register as a sex offender, with a release date the following year. The family's stated purpose in pursuing the civil case was to draw public attention back to a criminal investigation that had gone nowhere for more than a decade.

That strategy worked. The Montgomery County district attorney's office reopened its investigation after the verdict, and Collins was eventually certified to stand trial as an adult for the 1998 attack. The criminal case was moved to Galveston County because of pretrial publicity, and a jury there convicted him of capital murder in February 2015. He was sentenced to 40 years, the maximum available because he was 13 when the attack happened. Collins appealed that criminal conviction, arguing it was unconstitutional to try him as an adult for conduct committed when he was 13; the appeal was rejected in March 2017. No appeal was ever filed against the civil judgment itself.