$7.55 Million Verdict for Power Plant Worker with Mesothelioma

Gerald Sylvestre spent years working at the Merrimack Power Station in Bow, New Hampshire, where crews from New England Insulation Company regularly arrived to install and tear out insulation. The Canton, Massachusetts company had been selling, distributing, and installing Kaylo-brand asbestos insulation material from approximately 1968 through the mid-1970s. Sylvestre inhaled the dust that work generated. In 2015 he was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, the aggressive cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure.

Sylvestre and his family filed suit against New England Insulation in Middlesex County Superior Court. Thornton Law Firm, acting as co-counsel alongside Waters Kraus Paul and Siegel, took the case to trial before Judge Heidi E. Brieger. Andrew Wainwright and Andrea Landry of Thornton Law Firm served on the plaintiffs' trial team, joined by Waters Kraus partners Gary Paul (lead trial counsel) and Susan Ulrich.

The trial ran eight days. The central argument was that New England Insulation knew its products contained dangerous asbestos fibers and continued distributing and installing them without adequate warning. Jurors deliberated for three and a half hours before returning a verdict of $7,550,000. The breakdown included $3 million for pain and suffering, $3.05 million in economic damages, and $1.5 million for loss of consortium.

The verdict came in on September 20, 2017, and was widely described at the time as the largest asbestos damage award in New England history. Within two weeks, a separate Boston jury returned another multimillion-dollar verdict against the same defendant in a related case. Subsequent Massachusetts mesothelioma verdicts have since surpassed the Sylvestre award, but at the time it set a regional benchmark for asbestos-related product liability cases.