$82.1 Million for a Motorcyclist Who Lost Two Limbs, the Largest Trucking Verdict in Ohio History
After trial: No appeal or reduction had been publicly reported as of September 2026.
A Jefferson County jury awarded $82,105,345.70 to Michael Shank, a motorcyclist whose left arm and left leg were amputated after a commercial truck struck him near Steubenville. The verdict is reported as the largest trucking verdict in Ohio history, in a case the defense had offered $350,000 to settle.
What happened
On September 18, 2017, Michael Shank was on his motorcycle at the intersection of State Route 7 and State Route 213 in Jefferson County, Ohio, waiting to make a left turn, when a commercial truck struck him. The driver, Robert Gerner, worked for Hilltop Energy, an explosives company affiliated with the concrete supplier D.W. Dickey & Son, and part of his job was maintaining vehicles for the sister company.
Shank nearly died at the scene. His left arm was amputated above the elbow and his left leg above the knee. He also suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him with no memory of the crash, fractured ribs, collapsed lungs, and internal bleeding, and he went through surgeries spanning roughly eighteen months.
Liability was sharply disputed. The impact happened close to the unmarked centerline of the intersection, and the defense maintained throughout the case that Shank himself had caused the crash. The case was tried in the Jefferson County Court of Common Pleas as Case No. 2024 CV 00270. Before trial, plaintiff counsel demanded the defendants' insurance policy limits, represented at $37 million. The demand was refused. At a judicial settlement conference, the highest offer from the defendants and their insurers was $350,000.
Michael Leizerman and Jon Bond of The Law Firm for Truck Safety tried the case with co-counsel Aaron DeShaw, Jeff Bruzzese, and George Sidiropolis. At trial, the plaintiff team drew out that D.W. Dickey had no company safety policy for its commercial drivers beyond instructing them to follow the law, and that Hilltop Energy likewise had no safety program for its commercial drivers. The jury found Gerner negligent, found the two companies vicariously liable, and assigned Shank zero percent of the fault.
In late September 2025, the jury returned a verdict of $82,105,345.70. Of that, $79,105,345.70 went to Shank, who was 33 at trial, covering past and future medical care, prosthetic needs, lost earning capacity, and noneconomic losses recognized under Ohio law. His wife Brittany was awarded $3 million on her loss of consortium claim. The award has been reported as the largest trucking verdict on record in Ohio, the largest personal injury verdict in Jefferson County history, and the state's largest amputation verdict, and analysis of it was published by the national defense firm Lewis Brisbois as well as plaintiff-side outlets.
As of September 2026, no appeal, remittitur, or reduction of the verdict has been publicly reported. The jury's award came out to more than 230 times the defense's best settlement offer.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith: Jefferson County, Ohio Jury Awards Largest Trucking Verdict in Ohio History·Archived copy
- 2.Mondaq: Jefferson County, Ohio Jury Awards Largest Trucking Verdict In Ohio History·Archived copy
- 3.DeShaw Law: Amputation lawyer Aaron DeShaw obtains highest amputee verdict in U.S. history·Archived copy
- 4.Bruzzese and Hanlin: Historic $82.1 Million Truck Accident Verdict·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from The Law Firm for Truck Safety LLP
All The Law Firm for Truck Safety LLP proven verdicts →A Cuyahoga County jury awarded a combined $42.4 million in October 2014 to Joshua Rojas ($34.6 million) and Kiara Torres ($7.8 million), two teenage passengers who suffered brain injuries when the car they were riding in collided with a Concrete Designs Inc. dump truck; Andy Young, now of The Law Firm for Truck Safety, served as trial counsel, and in 2019 Ohio's Eighth District affirmed the verdicts while vacating a later prejudgment interest award.
A federal jury in Detroit held Crossfire, LLC and its driver Logan Goodrich responsible for the April 2018 crash that killed 21-year-old Dillon Montie at a US-23 exit ramp intersection in Monroe County, Michigan, and the court entered judgment on May 24, 2023. Law360 reported that Montie's parents were awarded more than $15.7 million; the plaintiff's firm and the news service of a trucking-lawyer membership group put the total verdict at $18.5 million, and the verdict form is not in the free public record. The defense had blamed Montie for speeding, but the trial judge had already struck its cell phone and roadway design defenses as unsupported and ruled that Crossfire would answer for Goodrich's negligence. Crossfire and Goodrich then moved for a new trial, remittitur, or a present cash value reduction, and Law360 reported in January 2024 that the parties resolved that dispute on terms that are not public, and the next docket entry, on February 7, 2024, is an order docketed as a vacatur, so no judgment figure from this case is confirmed to stand and the result is published unranked. No appeal was taken.
A dump truck hauling dirt for Jurgensen Co. entered the fast lane of I-75 from a dead stop during nighttime highway widening in Warren County, Ohio, and was rear-ended by Nicholas and Amanda Poe's car, killing them both. A Warren County jury found the truck's mud-caked lights and reflective tape, its missing high-intensity lighting, and inadequate work-zone signage contributed to the crash alongside Nicholas Poe's own speed. Because Ohio law makes a defendant found less than half at fault severally liable for only its share, and bars an over-50-percent-at-fault plaintiff from recovering, only Amanda Poe's estate collected, and only from Jurgensen's 25 percent share of the jury's $16 million verdict. The Twelfth District Court of Appeals affirmed the resulting $4 million judgment against Jurgensen in 2015.
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.