Largest Delaware Personal Injury Settlements

Schochor, Federico and Staton, P.A. represented the largest single group of plaintiffs in a $123 million class-action settlement against Beebe Medical Center for institutional failures that allowed pediatrician Earl Bradley to abuse hundreds of children over 15 years.

Thomas Crumplar and co-counsel secured a $77.425 million trust for 146 survivors of clergy sexual abuse as part of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington's Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in 2011.

A Kent County jury awarded John Vai $63 million against defrocked priest Francis DeLuca and St. Elizabeth's Parish in Wilmington after finding both liable for childhood sexual abuse that began in the 1960s, producing what victim advocates called the largest compensatory verdict in U.S. clergy abuse history and the first time an individual parish was held accountable.

Julie Bailey, a 60-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease, was found locked in the kitchen freezer room of the Lewes Convalescent Center hours after she was admitted in December 2002, and she died on January 21, 2003. A Sussex County jury awarded $13 million in compensatory damages to her estate, her husband and her three sons in March 2005. The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2006.

Larry Knecht, a lifelong auto mechanic in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed mesothelioma from working with Ford's asbestos-containing brakes and clutches and died in December 2014, more than three years before his case reached trial. His widow, Paula Knecht, tried the failure-to-warn claim to a Delaware jury in 2018 against Ford, the only defendant left of the eighteen originally sued. The jury set total compensatory damages at $40,625,000, assigned Ford 20 percent of the fault among twenty compared parties, and added $1,000,000 in punitive damages, putting Ford's total liability at $9,125,000. Ford's appeal reached the Delaware Supreme Court, which sent the case back on a legal technicality about how to measure an excessive verdict, but the trial judge again found the underlying figure sound and the number held. Final judgment of $9,125,000 plus interest was entered in November 2020, and Ford dropped its remaining appeal three months later.

A Delaware jury returned a unanimous $9 million verdict on July 23, 2025, in the first case ever tried over asbestos-contaminated shotgun shells, holding DuPont and Remington's successor liable for the mesothelioma death of Eugene Schoepke, an 84-year-old Illinois farmer and lifelong hunter.

A Delaware federal jury awarded Brian Elliott $2.4 million in November 2013 after finding Marist Brother Damian Galligan liable for repeated sexual abuse that began when Elliott was eight years old.

Robert Pasquale secured a $2.39 million jury verdict for Cynthia Cowee after a truck struck her vehicle as she exited a Wilmington Country Club driveway onto Route 52, with the Delaware Supreme Court ultimately reinstating that award after the trial court had ordered a second trial.

Arthur Krawitz won a $1.775 million federal jury verdict for a 59-year-old ironworker who suffered spinal and wrist fractures after falling from open steel framing at a Delaware construction site where no fall protection had been provided. The jury added $500,000 on his wife's consortium claim, which the court later reduced on remittitur.

On March 7, 2015, Ludmilla Permint was driving a 2014 Kia Soul in Sussex County when another vehicle struck it, and her husband Charles Permint, 74, seated in the front passenger seat, suffered fatal blunt chest trauma. The Permint family sued Kia Motors Corporation, Kia Motors America, and the dealership defendants, arguing a defective seat belt and restraint system let him strike the dashboard on impact. After a two-week trial in Delaware Superior Court, a jury found Kia negligent in the design of the restraint system and negligent in failing to warn of the risk, and awarded $1,600,000 in compensatory damages, apportioned among his widow, son, daughter, and granddaughter. The court denied Kia's post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law or a new trial and the same day granted the family prejudgment interest of $647,276.67, bringing the total judgment to roughly $2.25 million.

In April 2018, a nine-year-old girl was struck and killed by a passing car after crossing German Road in Seaford, Delaware, to check the mail. The driver, Dwayne McConnell, admitted he was inattentive and fled the scene; the girl had been in the care of her mother's boyfriend, Bryan Winder, while her mother was at work. A Sussex County jury found the girl was not negligent, split fault 90 percent to McConnell and 10 percent to Winder, and returned a verdict of $1,718,069.44 for her mother and her estate. The trial judge later set aside $350,000 of that award for the estate's conscious pain and suffering claim, leaving a judgment of $1,368,069.44 plus interest. Winder's first attempt to appeal was dismissed as premature in January 2026, without prejudice to a new appeal once a final judgment is entered.

New Castle County police officers shot and killed Lymond Moses, 30, in a Wilmington neighborhood on January 13, 2021. His sister sued the county in federal court as administrator of his estate. In July 2023, after summary-judgment briefing and before any trial, the county agreed to pay $1.05 million, with all claims against the officers dismissed and no admission of liability.