Largest Oklahoma Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected

On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.

Terral Ellis II, 26, walked into the Ottawa County Jail voluntarily on an outstanding warrant. He developed bronchopneumonia and spent twelve days asking for medical care for seizures, sweating and pain. Jail video captured staff and the jail nurse mocking him. He died of septic shock on October 22, 2015.

On July 2, 2018 Justin Fulton, 32, had surgery to remove hernia mesh. He woke with his right leg numb and fell to the floor when he tried to stand, because his right quadriceps would not work. Nerve studies showed no motor or sensory function in his right femoral nerve: the surgeon had cut into it and not recognized it. The injury is permanent. The defense offered $200,000. On April 7, 2022 an Oklahoma County jury voted 11 to 1 for the Fultons and awarded $17,500,000, entered as a judgment in May and released and satisfied in July 2022.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court restored the full $15 million jury award for oilfield worker Todd Beason, who lost part of an arm when a crane boom fell on him, and held the state's $350,000 cap on noneconomic damages unconstitutional.

A $15 million civil judgment was entered against the owner of five pit bulls that mauled 60-year-old Edgar Brown to death on SW 38th Street in Oklahoma City in October 2015, with Noble McIntyre representing the Brown family.

Elliott Earl Williams, 37, was arrested in Owasso on an obstruction complaint in October 2011. Shortly after booking at the Tulsa County Jail he suffered a severe neck injury that paralysed him from the chest down. He was left on the floor of a medical-unit cell, unable to move, for days, and died of complications of the untreated injury and dehydration.

Brennen Atkeson was exposed to asbestos as a child, second-hand, from dust carried into the family home on the work clothes of his stepfather, an oilfield worker. The fibers came from raw asbestos put into drilling-mud products and from drilling-rig products. He developed mesothelioma and died at 38.

A federal jury awarded Aldin Lewis $7.8 million after a Chandi 209 Trucking semi pulled onto W. Reno Avenue without stopping at a stop sign, blocking both eastbound lanes and leaving Lewis no room to brake.

Mitchell Boles was 51, profoundly disabled and dependent on constant supervision. He had lived about 40 years at the state's Southern Oklahoma Resource Center in Pauls Valley. When Oklahoma closed its institutions he was moved in January 2014 to a group home in northwest Oklahoma City run by Renaissance Management Group, and he died there. In October 2016 an Oklahoma County jury found the operator negligent, put 80 percent of the fault on it, awarded $4,000,000 in actual damages and then $4,000,000 in punitive damages. The judgment was $7,200,000.

Gregory N. Davis, 53, was booked into the Oklahoma County Detention Center in August 2021 on a misdemeanor outraging-public-decency complaint. Over nine days a peptic ulcer perforated. Another inmate testified that he screamed in pain, cried and begged for a nurse for days; detention officers reported none of it and missed mandatory cell checks. He was found unresponsive during a mental-health check and died at a hospital on August 12, 2021. On April 17, 2026 a federal jury unanimously found the jail trust deliberately indifferent to his medical need and awarded his estate $2,000,000.

A Tulsa County jury awarded $2 million to the family of a toddler injured at a church daycare after a second church hired the same worker without disclosing she was under investigation for abusing another child.

Carr & Carr attorney Laurie Koller secured a $1.5 million settlement for an Oklahoma family after a Woodshed liquor store sold vodka to their 17-year-old son without checking his ID, and he died in a crash on the morning of his junior prom.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court held that Progressive could not deny uninsured motorist benefits to a motorcyclist who had paid for UM coverage on a separate auto policy, ruling the exclusionary language void as against public policy.

The Tenth Circuit reversed a preemption-based dismissal and reinstated state-law mislabeling claims brought by cancer treatment providers who alleged that Genentech's Herceptin vials consistently contained less than the labeled 440 mg of trastuzumab, with Matthew Sill of Fulmer Sill serving as co-lead MDL counsel for the hospital plaintiffs.