An $11.8 Million Riverside Verdict for a Truck Crash Brain Injury
Won by The Dominguez Firm.
The Dominguez Firm won $11.8 million for Oscar Esparza, a driver left with a traumatic brain injury when a Win Distribution truck rear-ended his stopped car near the I-15 interchange, a result that ranked among the top 20 personal injury verdicts in California that year.
What happened
On a July morning in 2015, Oscar Esparza was driving his Mitsubishi Eclipse on the 91 freeway in Riverside County. Cristal rode in the front passenger seat, and her two young children sat in back. Traffic bunched up where the 91 feeds onto the northbound Interstate 15. A car ahead, driven by Dr. Jong-Tae Jinn, braked hard and came to a stop. Esparza stopped behind it, leaving about four feet of room.
Behind them, Juan Serafio was driving a two-axle Freightliner commercial truck for Win Distribution, Inc. He had driven trucks professionally for roughly 30 years. He did not slow in time. A passenger in another car saw the truck come up on the stopped traffic "at a large rate of speed" and testified that it "didn't slow down at all." The truck struck the Eclipse from behind in what one witness called a "huge collision."
The impact crushed the rear seats forward and pushed the front seats back. Esparza's head hit a seat belt retractor, rebounded, and struck the steering wheel. He lost consciousness. He came to about 15 to 20 minutes later, confused and dizzy, with slurred speech. He spent six days in the hospital with a cervical spine injury and a mild complicated traumatic brain injury. Cristal suffered a spinal disc injury, and the children had cuts, scrapes, and bruises.
The Dominguez Firm tried the case in Riverside County Superior Court before Judge L. Jackson Lucky IV. The first trial ended in a mistrial. At the retrial, Olivier Taillieu led the plaintiffs' team with Judd R. Allen, under firm founder Juan Dominguez. They kept the jury on the truck driver's speed and following distance. Serafio believed three truck lengths gave him enough room to react, yet he hit stopped traffic without braking hard enough to matter. The defense pointed to Dr. Jinn's abrupt stop as a competing cause.
The jury returned a verdict of $11,779,154.77. It found Win Distribution and Serafio negligent and rejected the defense theory that Dr. Jinn's stop caused the crash, deciding that the doctor's conduct was not a substantial factor in the harm. Esparza took the bulk of the award, including about $4.66 million in economic damages and $5.3 million for pain and suffering. Cristal received $1 million, and the two children shared $85,000. Dr. Jinn had settled before trial, so the court later applied a $47,000 credit against Esparza's economic damages for his share of that settlement.
Win Distribution appealed, arguing that the trial court let in improper evidence and wrongly awarded costs from both trials. On October 25, 2021, the Fourth District Court of Appeal rejected each argument and affirmed the judgment, including the full costs award.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.