$11 Million Verdict Against Road Contractor After Fatal Construction-Zone Crash in Manatee County
Won by Swope Rodante PA.
A Manatee County jury returned an $11 million verdict, including more than $9.8 million in punitive damages, against road-construction subcontractor L.E. Myers Co. after the firm proved it failed to close a required traffic lane, leading to a fatal collision in the work zone.
What happened
East 15th Street in Manatee County was supposed to have a lane shut down. L.E. Myers Co., a subcontractor working the corridor for Florida Power and Light, held a construction permit that required closing the lane adjacent to the active work area. On the day Allen Young was killed, that lane stayed open.
A trailer carrying steel poles sat at the edge of the work zone, its left rear tire over the lane line. A separate vehicle, traveling more than 90 mph in a posted 40 mph zone, struck a car stopped to turn into a nearby shopping center. The collision propelled that car directly into a concrete pole resting on the trailer. Allen Young sustained fatal injuries in the impact and died two years later.
Timothy Young, Allen's son and the personal representative of his estate, brought suit against multiple defendants including L.E. Myers. Swope Rodante P.A. attorney Lisha Bowen argued that the lane-closure requirement in the construction permit existed precisely to create a buffer between traffic and the work area, and that Myers's failure to comply with that requirement eliminated the margin of safety Allen Young needed to survive.
After a two-week trial before Judge Peter Dubensky in the 12th Judicial Circuit, the jury returned a verdict of $11,000,000 on September 17, 2013: roughly $1.2 million in compensatory damages and more than $9.8 million in punitive damages against L.E. Myers.
L.E. Myers appealed. The trial court had previously reduced the punitive award to approximately $3.6 million, bringing the total judgment to about $4.8 million. In 2015, Florida's Second District Court of Appeal reversed that judgment in L.E. Myers Co. v. Young, 165 So. 3d 1 (Fla. 2d DCA 2015). The appellate court held that pre-trial summary judgment rulings in the plaintiff's favor had been improper and that the evidentiary record did not meet the gross-negligence threshold required to support punitive damages. The case was remanded for a new trial.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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