Tire Tread Separation Rollover Leaves Driver a Quadriplegic, Jury Awards $23.4 Million

On March 23, 2007, Cynthia Castillo was driving her 1997 Ford Explorer on a freeway near Rancho Cucamonga, California, when the tread separated from the vehicle's left rear tire. The Explorer left the roadway and rolled down an embankment. Castillo, then 38, suffered a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed through her legs and most of her body. She became a quadriplegic, unable to care for herself and dependent on round-the-clock help for the rest of her life.

Castillo sued Ford Motor Co. in San Bernardino County Superior Court, case number CIVRS 706262, naming Ford along with the companies that made and installed the tires. Her attorney, Brian Brandt of the Law Office of Brian Brandt in Upland, argued that the tread separation alone should not have produced a rollover: it was the Explorer's handling, he told the jury, that turned a tire failure into a catastrophic loss of control. The plaintiff's case contended that Ford had long known about the handling problem and had a fix its own engineers had recommended, one the company did not carry over to the Explorers it sold in North America. Brandt tried the case with the Missouri product liability firm Langdon & Emison, which also worked the case for Castillo.

Ford's defense placed the blame on the tire rather than the vehicle. One of its lawyers told the jury the crash happened because the tire was worn out, not because of any design flaw in the Explorer. The case came down to which of those two explanations the jury believed.

After a trial that ran about six weeks and three days of deliberation, in February 2010 the jury returned a unanimous verdict for Castillo and found the Explorer defective. It awarded $23.4 million total: $13.4 million for her medical care and future needs, and $10 million for her pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. California caps non-economic damages such as pain and suffering only in medical malpractice cases; no similar cap applies to a product liability claim, so the $10 million stood as returned, alongside the $13.4 million set aside to fund a lifetime of care for someone with total paralysis.

The verdict was reported the same week by the Associated Press and by the legal trade press covering product liability litigation. No published appellate decision and no later news coverage describes what happened to the $23.4 million award after judgment, whether it was appealed, paid, or resolved by a later agreement, so we treat the amount that stood as the verdict as returned and the payment history as not public. The case was tried in the Rancho Cucamonga branch of the San Bernardino County Superior Court.