$72.5 Million Verdict for a Cancer Patient Struck and Dragged by an MTA Bus

In early 2017, Aurora Beauchamp, a native New Yorker then living in Florida, learned she had stage 4 uterine cancer and would be starting chemotherapy. She wanted to tell her mother, who still lived in Manhattan, face to face before the treatment took her hair. That is what brought her to the Lower East Side on the evening of March 6, 2017. Just before 9 pm, as she crossed East Houston Street in the crosswalk at Avenue D, an M14 bus making a right turn struck her and dragged her roughly 20 feet before coming to rest on her legs. She was pinned under the bus for about 20 minutes, conscious the whole time.

The crash crushed her pelvis and severed the nerves to her left leg at the spinal cord, leaving the leg paralyzed. Her right leg suffered a severe degloving injury that left an open wound still causing infections years later. She spent months in the hospital, all while fighting cancer, and has used a wheelchair since. The bus driver, Eduard Khanimov, pleaded guilty to failing to yield to a pedestrian. The MTA kept him on the payroll, reassigned as a cleaner.

Beauchamp and her husband Saul sued in Supreme Court, New York County, index number 159757/2017, naming the New York City Transit Authority, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transportation Operating Authority, and Khanimov. The transit defendants fought the case for seven years. Ed Cooper of Torgan Cooper + Aaron tried it for the Beauchamps, with associate Brendan Brown as second chair, before Judge Eric Schumacher in Manhattan. After weeks of trial, the jury needed only about three hours to decide.

On February 22, 2024 it returned a $72.5 million verdict: $25 million for past pain and suffering, $32 million for future pain and suffering, $8.5 million for future medical expenses, and $7 million to Saul Beauchamp for the loss of his wife's services and companionship. The New York Law Journal called the award potentially record-breaking, and the firm believes it is the largest pedestrian knockdown verdict ever returned against the MTA. "After fighting for my life for seven years, I am grateful to see this jury come through and help me get the medical care I need," Beauchamp told PIX11 News.

Here is the part that has to be said plainly: Aurora Beauchamp had not been paid while the case was on appeal, and the number did not survive intact. The MTA announced its appeal within a day of the verdict, with communications director Tim Minton calling it "another indication of how excessive awards in personal injury litigation impact funding that otherwise could be available to deliver transit service." Judgment was entered on or about May 30, 2025, and the Transit Authority and MaBSTOA took their appeal to the Appellate Division, First Department. The Beauchamps asked the appeals court for a calendar preference and an expedited briefing schedule, an understandable request for a woman in her seventies still battling cancer, and on December 4, 2025 the court said no. On September 17, 2026 the Appellate Division, First Department, modified the judgment. It cut the award for Aurora's future medical expenses to $8,238,345, and vacated the pain and suffering and loss of services awards unless the plaintiffs agree, within 30 days, to reduce them to $20 million for past pain and suffering, $17 million for future pain and suffering, $1.5 million for Saul's past loss of services and $1.1 million for his future loss of services. At those figures the award totals about $47.8 million. The court called that reduced total reasonable compensation for the extraordinary injuries and affirmed the judgment in all other respects. What the jury's three-hour verdict already established, and what no appeal can take back, is that twelve New Yorkers heard seven years of the MTA's defense and rejected it in an afternoon.