Jury Finds Goodyear Tire Defect Caused Fatal Crash That Killed Texas City Manager

On June 11, 2013, Ramiro Munoz was driving on a highway outside Carrizo Springs, a small city in South Texas where he served as city manager. A loaded cement truck coming the other way lost control and struck his vehicle. Munoz was killed. His family later traced the crash back to a single tire on the cement truck.

The left front tire on the truck was a Goodyear G286A 'Super Single' heavy truck tire, manufactured in 2009 at Goodyear's plant in Danville, Virginia. At some point before the crash, the tire's tread separated from the casing. Once that happened the driver lost control and the truck came across the road into Munoz's vehicle. Munoz's family sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in the 365th Judicial District Court in Dimmit County, arguing the tire left the factory defective.

The case took nearly six years to reach trial. Along the way, Goodyear fought the family's discovery requests, and the dispute reached the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio, which in April 2017 conditionally granted mandamus and ordered the trial judge to vacate an order enforcing an earlier discovery ruling against the tire maker. The underlying case, filed as Elvia Munoz, et al. v. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., et al., remained in the 365th District Court, and the discovery fight did not stop the family from eventually taking the case to a jury.

At trial, the family's engineers pointed to adhesion defects in the tire and to steel belts that were the wrong size and installed off-center. Five current and former workers from the Danville plant testified for the family about the conditions under which the tire was built, describing water contamination on the production line, inadequate inspection, and the use of old rubber stock. Goodyear disputed that any of this caused the tread separation.

On February 22, 2019, the jury sided with the family, returning a $33 million verdict and finding the tire's manufacturing defect responsible for 90 percent of the cause of Munoz's death. Ammons Law Firm trial attorney John Gsanger represented the family alongside co-counsel Brunkenhoefer P.C. After the verdict, Gsanger told a Virginia television station covering the Danville plant that 'the Danville Virginia Goodyear manufacturing plant is notorious for putting rapid production before workplace safety and quality control,' and that tread separation in the tire was 'the result of shoddy manufacturing.'

Trade-press coverage of the trial reported that before closing arguments Goodyear asked the family for an agreement that would take the gross-negligence question away from the jury, in exchange for a floor and a ceiling on what the family could recover and a waiver of Goodyear's right to appeal. The jury still returned its verdict, and no appeal of it appears in Texas appellate court records. The terms of that private agreement were never made public, so what the family finally collected is not a matter of public record.