$3 Million Settlement for Missouri Driver Hurt in Crash With Postal Service Van
After trial: The case settled without trial or appeal. Payment terms were not made public.
Won by Session Law Firm (co-counsel) and The Popham Law Firm.
Robert Schroer of Kingsville, Missouri, suffered a mild traumatic brain injury with permanent cognitive impairment when a U.S. Postal Service cargo van crashed into his car on U.S. 50 in November 2022. His claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act settled for $3 million in July 2025, after the case was filed in the Western District of Missouri in January 2024.
What happened
On November 16, 2022, Robert Schroer of Kingsville, Missouri, was driving on U.S. Route 50 in Johnson County, near County Road 1051 NW. According to his complaint, a U.S. Postal Service cargo van driven by a postal employee ran a stop sign at that intersection while the driver was distracted by a cell phone, and struck his car.
The impact sent Schroer's vehicle rolling. It came to rest more than 400 feet from the point of collision. Schroer got himself out of the car and was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion and released the same day.
His condition did not settle. Over the following days his symptoms worsened, including severe headaches, and he was later diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury and permanent cognitive impairment.
Federal law treats a crash with a postal vehicle differently from an ordinary collision. Because the driver worked for the Postal Service, the claim ran through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which makes the United States the defendant and sends the case to a federal judge rather than a jury. Schroer's suit, Schroer v. United States, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in January 2024 as case 4:24-CV-00061 and assigned to Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr.
Paul Anderson of The Popham Law Firm served as lead counsel for Schroer, working with William Session of the Session Law Firm, both of Kansas City. The government was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Vanessa Kamberis of the Western District of Missouri. Both sides retained neurology and psychology experts. Schroer's team called on neurologist Dr. Randall Benson of Novi, Michigan, and psychologist Dale Halfaker of Springfield. The government's experts were neurologist Dr. Richard Dubinsky of the University of Kansas Medical Center and psychologist Eric Hart of Kansas City.
The case settled on July 25, 2025, for $3 million, about eighteen months after it was filed and before any trial. The settlement resolved Schroer's claim without a bench trial.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from The Popham Law Firm
All The Popham Law Firm proven verdicts →The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
A Cass County jury awarded $10 million to the husband and eight daughters of Kathleen Miller, 62, who died after a pickup truck crossed the center line on Missouri Highway 52 and struck her vehicle head-on.
A Henry County jury awarded $9.04 million to the family of 75-year-old Sondra Murrell, who died when an oncoming driver crossed the centerline, and to her grandson, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the same crash.
A Linn County jury returned a $9 million verdict for Audrey Ford, a motorcycle passenger whose right leg was amputated above the knee after a driver pulled into the path of the bike at a rural Missouri intersection.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.