$24 Million Verdict After Coca-Cola Driver on Hands-Free Call Blindsided a Woman at an Intersection
Won by Thomas J. Henry.
A Nueces County jury awarded Vanice Chatman-Wilson $24 million, including $10 million in punitive damages, after a Coca-Cola employee on a hands-free business call turned left into oncoming traffic and crushed Chatman-Wilson's car at a downtown Corpus Christi intersection.
What happened
In August 2010, Vanice Chatman-Wilson, then 37, was driving through a downtown Corpus Christi intersection on her way to work when a Coca-Cola Refreshments delivery vehicle hit her car on the driver's side. The Coca-Cola driver, Araceli Venessa Cabral, was on a hands-free business call at the time. According to testimony at trial, Cabral mistook the signal, believed she had a green turn arrow, and turned left into oncoming traffic. The impact crushed the driver's side of Chatman-Wilson's Ford Fusion.
Chatman-Wilson suffered a serious spinal injury that required lumbar surgery. After the operation she was left with 25 percent permanent disability and ongoing nerve damage in her back. The crash upended her ability to work and left her with long-term medical costs.
Thomas J. Henry and co-counsel Robert Hilliard sued Cabral individually for negligence and sued Coca-Cola Refreshments on a respondeat superior theory, arguing Cabral was acting in her capacity as a company agent at the time of the crash. A central theme at trial was Coca-Cola's distracted-driving policy. The plaintiffs argued the policy was vague and poorly enforced, and that the company had withheld it from Cabral herself. Cabral testified during the trial that she was unaware of the risks of driving while on a cell phone.
The Nueces County jury, a panel of six with five signing the verdict, returned a total award of $24 million on May 4, 2012. That figure included roughly $14 million in compensatory damages covering Chatman-Wilson's lost wages, medical expenses, and pain and suffering, plus $10 million in punitive damages directed at Coca-Cola. (Reporting across outlets cited totals of $21 million, $22 million, and $24 million, reflecting different breakdowns of the compensatory and punitive components; the Insurance Journal reported the total at $24 million.)
Coca-Cola announced plans to appeal the verdict, contending the damages bore 'no connection to her injuries' and that Cabral had followed company policy by using a hands-free device. No public record of a final appellate reduction has been identified in the sources reviewed for this story. Henry told reporters at the time that the verdict sent a message to corporate fleets about the real cost of distracted-driving policies that exist on paper but go unenforced.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Insurance Journal: Jury Awards $24M to Woman Hit by Driver on Phone in Texas (May 7, 2012)·Archived copy
- 2.Automotive Fleet: Jury Awards $21 Million to Woman Struck by Coca-Cola Truck (2012)·Archived copy
- 3.Detroit Legal News: Texas Injury Caused by Cell Phone Use Yields $22M Verdict (2012)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Thomas J. Henry
All Thomas J. Henry proven verdicts →In February 2022, a federal judge ordered the United States to pay $230 million to survivors and families of the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting after finding the Air Force 60 percent liable for failing to report the gunman's criminal history to the federal background check system.
A Bexar County jury returned a $59.8 million verdict, later converted to a $60.09 million judgment, for 23-year-old Armando Guerrero III after a drunk driver ran a red light at nearly twice the posted speed limit on Southwest Military Drive.
A Bexar County jury in November 2017 returned a verdict reported at $43.5 million for Jenny Hennes of Lytle, who was rear-ended on I-35 in San Antonio in 2015 by an SUV that belonged to oilfield services company JC Fodale Energy Services and was driven by its employee Mickey Hunt. Jurors heard that Hunt had texted more than 2,000 times while driving in the five months before the crash. The award included $30 million in punitive damages against the company and $2.5 million against Hunt. While the defendants' appeal was pending, the parties settled on undisclosed terms that released the judgment, and the appeal was dismissed in January 2019.
On December 10, 2021, a federal jury in Pensacola awarded Army veteran Theodore Finley $22.5 million against 3M and its Aearo subsidiaries. Finley developed bilateral tinnitus and noise-induced hearing loss while wearing the Combat Arms Earplug Version 2 during service from 2006 to 2014. The jury found the earplugs defective and awarded $7.5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages. It was the largest verdict to that point in the bellwether series.
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.