South Texas Jury Awards $11.27 Million After Tractor-Trailer Crosses Median on Highway 77
Won by Thomas J. Henry.
A federal jury in Corpus Christi returned $11.27 million for Alexandro Puga, a pickup truck driver left with spinal, pelvic, and leg fractures after a tractor-trailer hauling an RCX Solutions trailer crossed the center median on a rain-soaked Highway 77 and hit him head-on.
What happened
On a rain-soaked stretch of Highway 77 in Refugio County in 2015, Ronald Brown was driving a tractor owned by About Tyme Transport, pulling a trailer leased to RCX Solutions. Brown was on a cell phone or Bluetooth device when his rig hydroplaned across the center median and crossed into southbound traffic. Alexandro Puga was heading south in a pickup truck. The two vehicles collided head-on. Brown died at the scene.
Puga survived but his injuries were severe: burns on his left hand, fractures to his spine, pelvis, both legs, and fingers. He was still undergoing treatment more than two years after the crash. His wife, Norma Puga, also brought claims for loss of consortium.
The case presented a key liability question. RCX Solutions argued it was only a freight broker and bore no responsibility for Brown's conduct. The Law Offices of Thomas J. Henry, led by Thomas J. Henry and Richard W. Hunnicutt III, asked the jury to find that the working arrangement between Brown and RCX constituted a lease or employment relationship that made the carrier liable for its driver's negligence.
The jury agreed. After trial in the Southern District of Texas in Corpus Christi, it found RCX Solutions liable and returned a verdict of $11.27 million, which included damages for Puga's physical injuries and amounts for Norma Puga's consortium claims.
RCX Solutions appealed to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In April 2019, a three-judge panel upheld liability but found the past consortium damages excessive under the Texas maximum-recovery rule, reducing that portion of the award. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the future consortium award of $1.8 million. Transport Topics reported that after the appellate reduction, the total judgment came to approximately $7.5 million. RCX's insurer paid $1 million; RCX was left holding $6.5 million it could not pay. The company shut down in March 2020 and its owner filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2021.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.
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.
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.