Jury Verdict Over Snow Machine Death Near Barrow, Reduced by Alaska Cap to $1.28 Million
After trial: The jury's $1,756,365 award was reduced under Alaska's noneconomic damages cap (AS 09.17.010) to $1,280,675, the figure stated in the Alaska Supreme Court's opinion. The court affirmed the denial of a new trial or remittitur in 2009.
An 18-year-old died in May 2005 when his snow machine went into a hole in the ice near Barrow that North Slope Borough Public Works had dug. His mother, Isabel Brower, sued the Borough, and an August 2007 jury found it negligent and a legal cause of his death. The jury awarded $1,756,365. Alaska's cap on noneconomic damages cut the award to $1,280,675, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed in 2009.
What happened
Alfred Brower was 18 when he died in late May 2005. His snow machine went into a hole in the ice near Barrow, a hole that had been dug by the North Slope Borough's Department of Public Works. He was unmarried and lived in Barrow with his widowed mother, Isabel Brower. He did not have a steady job, but he hunted and fished for the subsistence foods the household ate, and he cooked, cleaned and did maintenance work around the house.
Isabel Brower sued the Borough in the Alaska Superior Court at Barrow, on her own behalf as a dependent of her son and as personal representative of his estate. She claimed the Borough's negligence caused his death and the pain and suffering he experienced before it. The case went to a jury in August 2007.
On August 11, 2007, the jury found the Borough negligent and found that its negligence was a legal cause of Alfred's death. It also found that Isabel had been dependent on him at the time and that his contributions to her support would have continued had he lived. The jury found Alfred himself negligent, but not a legal cause of his death, so his share of fault did not reduce the award.
The jury's verdict totaled $1,756,365. It was itemized as $400,000 for Alfred's pain and suffering before death, $250,000 for Isabel's past loss of her son's companionship and her own suffering, $62,250 for past loss of support and assistance, $200,000 for her future noneconomic loss, and $844,115 for future economic loss, reduced to present value.
Alaska law caps noneconomic damages in cases like this one under AS 09.17.010, and the parties agreed on how the cap applied. The trial court reduced the noneconomic portion of the verdict accordingly. The Alaska Supreme Court, in its opinion, put the amount of damages after the cap at $1,280,675. The trial court then added prejudgment interest, costs and attorney's fees to reach its final judgment.
The Borough moved for a new trial or a remittitur, and the trial court denied both. On appeal the Borough argued that Isabel should not have been allowed to recover damages both as a statutory beneficiary and as the estate's representative, that she had not proved she depended on her son's future earnings, and that his lifetime earnings should have been measured by her life expectancy rather than his. In its 2009 opinion in North Slope Borough v. Brower, 215 P.3d 308, the Alaska Supreme Court rejected each argument, relying on its earlier decision in Kulawik v. ERA Jet Alaska, and affirmed the denial of a new trial or remittitur. David Henderson of the Law Offices of David Henderson in Bethel represented Isabel Brower on appeal, as the opinion's counsel listing shows.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from The Law Offices of David Henderson
All The Law Offices of David Henderson proven verdicts →Phyllis Rivers, pregnant, was treated at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. Her doctors noted at least three indicators of infective endocarditis, rejected that diagnosis in favor of pregnancy-induced vasculitis, stopped her antibiotics after four days and sent her home. Untreated, the infection caused a stroke that left her paralyzed. After a bench trial under the Federal Tort Claims Act the court entered a $22,000,000 judgment against the United States and found the doctors reckless, which lifted Alaska's $400,000 malpractice cap. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2018.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.