Largest Utah Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected

A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.

A retrial jury in Utah's Fourth District Court awarded $81 million against Beacon Roofing Supply after one of its trucks struck and killed a 12-year-old boy who was crossing legally in a marked crosswalk.

On Halloween night 2021 Season Dow's car ran out of gas on Interstate 15 in Orem and she stopped on the shoulder with her hazard lights on. Kesley Pope, 22, driving her father's uninsured truck at about twice the legal blood alcohol limit, drove straight into it. Season Dow died at the scene and her 16-year-old son died in hospital. Pope is in prison. In June 2026, after a two-day civil trial, Judge Derek Pullan ordered her to pay the family $60,000,000.

A federal jury in Utah awarded $52.2 million to the survivors of Rulon Allred, believed at the time to be the largest wrongful death verdict in state history, against the woman who confessed in print to killing him 15 years earlier.

A 3-year-old girl was found with a window blind cord wrapped around her neck at her family's home in Lehi. She died a week later of brain damage from oxygen deprivation. The jury found Century Blinds had made corded blinds for years without fitting a tilt wand that cost nothing extra, and without supplying the cleats that let a parent wind cords out of reach.

Siegfried and Jensen attorneys, led by Joseph Steele, were appointed Special Assistant Attorneys General in the Utah Attorney General's action against Eli Lilly, securing a $24 million settlement over the company's decade-long campaign to push its antipsychotic Zyprexa to Medicaid patients for conditions the FDA had never approved.

A girl of 14 was married to her 19-year-old cousin in a ceremony Warren Jeffs arranged and performed himself, over her objections, and then pressured to bear children. She sued Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 2005 under the initials MJ. Neither defended. On September 5, 2017 Judge Keith Kelly entered a $16,000,000 default judgment: $4,000,000 in damages and $12,000,000 in punitive damages. Jeffs is serving life plus 20 years in Texas.

Madison Jensen, 21, was booked into the Duchesne County Jail in 2016 after her father contacted authorities for help with her heroin addiction and suicidal thoughts. Over four days of withdrawal she could not keep food or water down. She died of severe dehydration. The jury found the county had failed to train its staff or set any protocol for inmate medical problems.

Parker and McConkie secured a $13.5 million settlement for the family of Lauren McCluskey, a University of Utah track athlete murdered on campus after police failed to act on her repeated stalking reports.

A federal judge awarded $10.55 million to the family of Esther Nakajjigo, a 25-year-old Ugandan human rights activist killed on her honeymoon when an unsecured metal gate arm at Arches National Park swung into her husband's vehicle, delivering the largest federal wrongful death verdict in Utah history.

The University of Utah agreed to pay $5 million to the parents of Zhifan Dong, a 19-year-old international student killed by her boyfriend at a Salt Lake City hotel in February 2022, after an internal review confirmed university staff missed repeated warning signs that she was in danger.

Lillian Birt was in the ICU with respiratory failure, septic shock and reduced heart function. Her children agreed to discontinue life support because they understood from her doctors that her condition was terminal and treatment was only prolonging her death. It was not terminal, and there was a high likelihood she would have recovered. She died about eight hours later.

A Salt Lake City mother called 911 asking for help getting her autistic 13-year-old son to a hospital during a separation-anxiety crisis. An officer chased the unarmed boy over a fence and fired eleven shots from 15 to 20 feet away. Six hit him. The city paid $3 million, the largest such settlement in its history.

A Weber County jury awarded $2.5 million in non-economic damages ($1.875 million after a 25 percent comparative-fault reduction) to the widow of a Utah man fatally struck by a New Prime semi-truck near his broken-down vehicle on the I-15 shoulder. The Utah Court of Appeals later reversed the verdict and remanded for a new trial.

Amy Herzog worked at Jupiter Bowl in Kimball Junction. During a Park City Mountain Resort employee party in April 2019, a resort employee performed a 360-degree spin and released his ball into her lane while she was freeing a stuck ball from the gutter, crushing her left hand. Three surgeries left her with a permanently deformed hand that cannot form a fist. A Summit County jury found Vail Resorts 80 percent at fault and its employee 20 percent, awarded $2,402,000, and found the employee was acting within the scope of his employment. The trial judge later vacated the employer-liability finding and cut the award by 20 percent, but the Utah Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in 2025 and reinstated the full judgment.

Morley Reed Sprague had advanced multiple sclerosis and lower-body paralysis and could not reposition himself. He entered Avalon Care Center with a small stage-one pressure ulcer on his right buttock. Within a month it had deteriorated to exposed bone and become infected. He never recovered and died 22 months later.

Salt Lake County paid $1.5 million to the mother of a 25-year-old woman who died of methamphetamine toxicity at the county jail after nursing staff dismissed her overdose symptoms as a panic attack and left her unmonitored in a prone position.

Utah's Department of Transportation paid $1.45 million to resolve wrongful-death and injury claims brought by survivors and families of four Chinese tourists killed when a tour bus rolled over on a freshly resurfaced section of State Road 12 near Bryce Canyon in September 2019.