Buffalo Grove Family Wins $4.5 Million After Teen Drowns at Michigan Summer Camp
Won by Smith LaCien LLP.
CampGroup LLC paid $4.5 million to settle the wrongful death of a 15-year-old Buffalo Grove boy who drowned during an unsupervised nighttime lake swim at Greenwoods Camp for Boys in Michigan, a result the Jury Verdict Reporter ranked as Illinois's second-highest settlement for the drowning death of a minor.
What happened
On the evening of July 20, 2011, a group of roughly 15 boys at Greenwoods Camp for Boys entered a lake near Decatur, Michigan, for a swim session that began after 10 p.m. Sunset had occurred more than an hour earlier, and there were no lights installed to maintain visibility over the swimming area. Jacob Waxberg, a 15-year-old from Buffalo Grove heading into his sophomore year at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, began struggling in the water. He disappeared beneath the surface without anyone noticing.
Nearly 30 minutes passed before counselors and responding emergency personnel located him. Michigan State Police and local units searched the lake in darkness. Despite CPR and emergency transport to a hospital, Waxberg could not be revived. He had been at the camp less than 48 hours.
The family retained Todd Smith and Brian LaCien, along with Thomas Power, of what was then Power Rogers and Smith. The attorneys filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in December 2011 in Cook County Circuit Court, naming CampGroup LLC, the corporate operator of the camp, along with camp directors and associated entities. The core allegation was straightforward: Michigan regulations prohibit organized swimming after dark, and the camp had no lighting that would have allowed a lifeguard to monitor swimmers in those conditions.
The camp's director disputed the characterization of the lighting, but the case record showed that Waxberg remained undetected in the water for close to half an hour. The plaintiff's team argued the camp's decision to conduct a lake swim after nightfall, without adequate supervision or illumination, was a direct violation of applicable safety standards.
Cook County Associate Judge Randye A. Kogan approved a $4.5 million settlement in March 2013. CampGroup LLC, as the operator, paid the full amount. The Jury Verdict Reporter identified it as the second-highest settlement in Illinois for a case involving the drowning death of a minor.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Smith LaCien LLP
All Smith LaCien LLP proven verdicts →A Cook County jury awarded $51 million to John Reinke after OSF Heart of Mary Medical Center discharged him without testing his blood sugar, leading to a diabetic cardiac arrest that left him with a permanent brain injury.
A Cook County judge approved an $18.5 million settlement for Gabriela Cedillo, a 24-year-old extra who suffered catastrophic brain damage when a snapped tow cable tore through her windshield during filming of Transformers: Dark of the Moon in Hammond, Indiana.
Chicago agreed to pay $9.5 million to Catalin Dumitrescu, who suffered catastrophic injuries in 2014 when his bicycle wheel lodged in exposed streetcar rails that had been buried in an East Hyde Park street and then re-designated as a bike route without removing the decades-old hazard.
The estate of helicopter pilot Michael Russell recovered $8.15 million, then Illinois's highest reported product-liability settlement involving a helicopter, after a defective tail-rotor drive-shaft bearing caused his Agusta 109C to spin out of control and crash near DuPage Airport. Todd Smith and Brian LaCien, who later founded Smith LaCien LLP, handled the case at their prior firm, Power, Rogers & Smith P.C.
Related wrongful death 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.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.