$22.6 Million Verdict for Port Trucker Left Permanently Disabled After On-the-Job Crash
Won by Ven Johnson Law, PLC.
A Wayne County jury awarded $22.6 million to port truck driver Burt Holt, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and permanent disability when a negligent driver struck him while he inspected his trailer at a Detroit shipping terminal in 2011.
What happened
On March 3, 2011, Burt Holt, then 52, was doing routine work: inspecting his trailer at Container Port Group on Fort Street in Detroit. A truck driven by Amarild Ushe, operating for Reliable Transportation Specialists, struck Holt while he was on the ground. The collision ended his trucking career and set in motion years of medical treatment.
Holt's injuries were severe and lasting. He underwent four surgeries and extended inpatient rehabilitation. His treating physicians testified at trial that the crash caused a traumatic brain injury, severe depression, and chronic pain syndrome, conditions they described as lifelong and expected to worsen with age. He lost his trucking business entirely.
Ven Johnson of Johnson Law, PLC tried the case over three weeks before Judge Kathleen MacDonald in Wayne County Circuit Court. The plaintiff's team put Holt's treating physicians on the stand and presented evidence that Ushe's negligence was the direct cause of each injury and its long-term consequences. The defense contested liability and the severity of Holt's claimed damages.
On June 9, 2015, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of $22.6 million, the largest personal injury verdict in Michigan that year. Of that total, $15.6 million was entered as a judgment against Reliable Transportation Specialists, Ushe, and Container Port Group. Crain's Detroit Business later ranked the result alongside Geoffrey Fieger's $21 million Beaumont Hospital verdict as one of the two largest 2015 jury verdicts in the state.
The defense appealed. On May 23, 2017, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict, finding no significant trial errors warranting reversal. Christopher Desmond of the firm handled the appeal.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Ven Johnson Law, PLC
All Ven Johnson Law, PLC proven verdicts →A federal jury in Atlanta awarded $100 million to Jerry Blasingame, left quadriplegic at 65 after an Atlanta police officer tased him without warning during a foot pursuit, though the award was ultimately reduced to $21 million following post-trial rulings and a 2026 Eleventh Circuit decision.
A Wayne County jury awarded $20,595,570 to Terry Novak after a van driver for FSS Technologies lost control, crossed the center line, and struck Novak while he was clearing snow from his own driveway in Romulus.
Michigan State University agreed to pay $5 million each to the families of Arielle Anderson and Brian Fraser, two of the three students shot and killed on campus on February 13, 2023, with Ven Johnson negotiating both settlements before any lawsuit was filed.
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.