Seattle Cyclist Awarded $16 Million After Brain Injury at UW Speed Bump
After trial: Reduced and paid. The $16.3 million is the university's share of the jury's $40.7 million damages finding, cut after the jury assigned 60 percent of fault to Spencer.
A King County jury found that a speed bump the University of Washington had known for years was dangerous to cyclists caused a 2020 crash that left finance executive Jonathan Spencer with a severe traumatic brain injury. The jury set total damages at $40.7 million and assigned 60 percent of the fault to Spencer and 40 percent to the university, leaving the state liable for about $16.3 million. Five earlier cyclist crashes at the same speed bump, including one that had already produced a jury verdict against the university, had put UW on notice before Spencer's crash. UW removed the speed bump two years after Spencer was hurt. Todd Gardner represented Spencer at trial.
What happened
On the morning of April 27, 2020, Jonathan Spencer set out on a long bike ride around Lake Washington and across the SR 520 floating bridge. On his way home, riding south of Husky Stadium on the University of Washington campus along a stretch of Walla Walla Road Northeast he had traveled many times before, he swerved to avoid the steep edge of a raised speed bump. He missed his line by a couple of inches. The bike twisted beneath him, and he was thrown headfirst onto the pavement.
Spencer, then 50 and less than a year into a job as a finance executive for Pacific Market International, suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was rushed to Harborview Medical Center, where surgeons removed part of his skull to relieve pressure on his swelling brain. He spent a year in the hospital and in rehabilitation before returning home in May 2021, to a house remodeled with a lift and a medical suite. He can no longer work, needs a walker to get around, and lives with lasting short term and long term memory problems. His wife, Elise, became his full time caretaker. Before the crash, Spencer had summited Denali, run marathons, and ridden long distance cycling events including the Seattle to Portland race and the RAMROD loop around Mount Rainier.
Spencer sued the state of Washington, arguing the university had known the speed bump was dangerous and left it in place anyway. Court filings showed that five other cyclists had reported crashes at the same spot before Spencer's, including a 2017 crash that left Roger Stocker with catastrophic head injuries requiring round the clock care. A King County jury had already returned a verdict against the university over that crash, and Stocker later died of his injuries in 2019. The university did not remove the speed bump until 2022, two years after Spencer was hurt, replacing it with a more gradually raised crosswalk.
The case went to trial in King County Superior Court. The jury found both the state, through the university, and Spencer himself negligent, and set total damages at $40.7 million: $4.8 million in past medical expenses, $2.5 million in past economic losses, $18.4 million in future economic losses, and $15 million in other damages to Spencer and his family. Jurors assigned 60 percent of the fault to Spencer and 40 percent to the state. Under Washington's comparative fault rule, that split left the university responsible for roughly $16.3 million of the total, the figure that stood as the judgment.
Todd Gardner, Spencer's attorney, argued that the fault split understated the university's responsibility. 'They knew people were getting hurt. They knew the speed bump was a hazard,' Gardner said after the verdict. 'The state knew it was causing all these problems, and failed to remove it. It should never have been there in the first place.' A University of Washington spokesperson said only that the school was reviewing the verdict and had no further comment. No appeal has surfaced in public records since the October 2024 verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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