Gabe Knisely

A DeKalb County jury awarded more than $77.5 million to the family of Nicholas Carusillo, a 29-year-old with bipolar disorder who was taken off lithium at Metro Atlanta Recovery Residences over his providers' objections, discharged over a phone rule violation, and killed on Interstate 85 less than three days later. MARR appealed in May 2024, and the case settled confidentially in 2025 after the Georgia Court of Appeals remanded it for settlement approval.

Douglas Burchfield, a General Mills employee at the company's cereal plant in Covington, Georgia, suffered the partial amputation of both legs when a loaded railcar rolled loose and ran him over during a routine railcar switch in June 2005. He sued CSX Transportation, which had delivered the car, arguing it put the car into service with a defective handbrake. A first jury cleared CSX, but the 11th Circuit reversed after finding the trial court had improperly let CSX show the jury a reenactment video, and a retrial jury found Burchfield zero percent negligent, CSX 100 percent negligent, and awarded him $20,559,004. CSX appealed, and while that appeal was pending the parties settled the claim for $16 million, which CSX paid.

Adelaida Anderson lost her left leg below the knee after falling from a stand-up forklift with an unguarded rear entry at a FedEx warehouse in Effingham, Illinois, and being run over by the machine. A first jury sided with manufacturer The Raymond Corporation in 2021, but the Seventh Circuit reversed in 2023 for wrongly excluding Anderson's alternative-design expert. On retrial, a jury awarded Anderson $13,045,776 in January 2024, covering disfigurement, loss of normal life, pain, medical costs, lost wages, and a loss-of-consortium award to her late husband's estate. The trial judge denied Raymond's post-trial motion to undo the verdict in July 2024.