$20 Million Judgment Against U.S. for Driver Paralyzed When Smithsonian Bus Ran Red Light

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. entered a $20 million judgment against the United States for an 18-year-old driver who suffered a devastating brain injury when a Smithsonian Institution bus ran a red light and struck his car. Judge Ricardo M. Urbina issued the damages ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on September 10, 2003, in Calva-Cerqueira v. United States, a Federal Tort Claims Act case.

The collision happened on the morning of Sunday, June 14, 1998, at Eye Street and South Capitol Street, S.W. Enrique Calva-Cerqueira was driving east when the bus, heading south at a speed above the 25 mph limit, went through the red light and hit his car. The bus weighed nearly seven times as much as the car. After a three-day bench trial, the court found the government liable on May 3, 2001. Gerard E. Mitchell and Laurie A. Amell of Stein, Mitchell & Mezines, the firm now named Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner, represented the plaintiff.

He arrived at George Washington University Hospital in a deep coma with injuries to the brain, skull and chest. After three weeks he moved to the National Rehabilitation Hospital, where he stayed until late December 1998 and began speaking again that August. Imaging showed skull base fractures, the absence of the right frontal lobe, and hemorrhagic damage and scarring deep in the brain. The court found paralysis and decreased sensation on his left side, quadriparesis, severe memory and learning deficits, and impaired judgment and problem solving. He uses a wheelchair, cannot transfer without help, and needs assistance around the clock. Before the crash he had been a strong soccer player holding down a job and planning to attend community college.

The damages phase was an eight-day bench trial beginning December 9, 2002. Both sides called life-care planners, vocational experts and economists, and the plaintiff's neurologist, neuropsychologist and neuroradiologist described the damage to his brain. The government argued that an earlier 1994 accident had caused a mild brain injury; the court found no such injury documented in his records and called the evidence speculative. It also rejected the government's lower view of his likely earnings and accepted the plaintiff's experts on future care and wage growth.

The court's findings were $5,000,000 for pain and suffering, $899,325 for past medical expenses, $2,562,906 for future lost wages and $15,435,836 for future medical and related expenses. That came to a little under $23.9 million. The Federal Tort Claims Act limits recovery to the amount of the administrative claim filed with the government before suit, so the court reduced the award to $20 million. It declined the government's request for a reversionary medical trust, so money set aside for his future care would not revert to the government if unused, and ordered the government to pay the fees of the court-appointed guardian ad litem.

The government filed a notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit. In December 2004 Mitchell filed a satisfaction of judgment on the docket, and the appeals court granted a consent motion dismissing the appeal.