Chante DePersia

An Essex County jury awarded $55 million to Angel May Rider, a young barista who lost both legs after a tractor trailer owned by Jersey City Transfer and Alert Motor Freight jackknifed on a rain-slicked stretch of I-95 and pinned her against a guardrail. Reported as the largest verdict in Essex County history, the award was affirmed in full by the New Jersey Appellate Division in May 2026.

Jake Chamseddine, a photographer working Green Day's Hella Mega Tour, was leaving Citizens Bank Park after the August 2021 Philadelphia show when a stagehand jumped off a moving forklift without setting the parking brake. The unmanned machine rolled down an exit ramp and crushed him against a concrete and metal post, lacerating his femoral artery and breaking his pelvis, femur, and lower back. He sued the Phillies, Live Nation, staging contractor Tri-State Stage Labor, and the forklift driver. After seven days of trial before Judge Caroline Turner, the defendants settled for $18 million on November 1, 2024, with Live Nation and Tri-State paying most of it.

Robert Wilson, a temporary laborer placed by PeopleReady at an I.T. Landes and Son job site, showed up visibly under the influence of drugs and was told by his supervisor to leave. Driving home, he hit a parked car and pushed it onto Daniel Dwyer, pinning and crushing Dwyer's legs. A Philadelphia jury found on June 1, 2023 that Wilson was acting within the scope of his employment and that the two employers, which had substance-abuse policies they never gave him, bore 95 percent of the fault. The verdict was $5,053,946.

Joyce Ferguson, 49, was rear-ended on Interstate 95 by Gregory Benton-Logan in December 2019. Her X-rays were clean, but an MRI seven months later showed a syrinx, a fluid-filled cyst, on her cervical spine, and two neurosurgeons tied it to the crash. Unable to keep working, she retired on disability from a federal job that paid more than $100,000 a year. The defense called it a minor rear-end accident and suggested she was malingering; the final offer was $150,000. On September 29, 2023, after a three-day trial before Judge Spiros Angelos, a Delaware County jury awarded her $3,639,125.