CVN screenshot of plaintiff attorney John Simon delivering his closing argument
St. Louis, MO - A Missouri state court jury delivered a $462 million verdict Thursday, including $450 million in punitive damages, in a products liability lawsuit claiming the design of a truck’s rear impact collision guard failed to prevent the otherwise avoidable deaths of two men who crashed their car into the rig.
The St. Louis jury awarded $6 million each in compensatory damages to the families of decedents Taron Tailor and Nicholas Perkins, who died in 2019 when their Volkswagen sedan slammed into the back of a trailer manufactured by Wabash National and slid underneath the truck. Their lawsuit accused Wabash of using a rear impact guard they knew to provide inadequate protection against so-called “underride impacts” but the company maintained they complied with federal safety standards, and that the crash occurred at a speed impossible for the men in the car to survive.
The full trial, which has potentially major industry-wide implications for numerous trucking rig manufacturers, was recorded and webcast gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network. Subscribers to CVN’s online trial video library get unlimited on-demand access to the full proceedings, including all witness testimony, along with hundreds of other civil trials in a range of practice areas from throughout the United States.
The jury reached their verdict after roughly three hours of deliberations following a two-week trial.
Attorney John Simon of Simon Law, who represents the plaintiffs, issued a statement after the trial saying the verdict sends a message that “...reckless disregard for human life won’t be tolerated in our community.”
Wabash general counsel Kristin Glazner issued a statement after the verdict saying the company is evaluating “all available legal options” and reiterating arguments made at trial that, “No rear impact guard or trailer safety technology has ever existed that would have made a difference here.”
The accident occurred when the sedan, driven by Tailor, crashed into the back of the Wabash-manufactured rig at a speed the plaintiff attorneys and their expert witnesses said was effectively about 45 miles per hour. Jurors heard testimony that a rear impact guard with four protective posts instead of an older design using two posts would have prevented the fatal underride.
The plaintiff legal team argued throughout the trial that Wabash never performed effective crash testing on the two-post guard despite using it for nearly 30 years, and that the company chose not to upgrade their rigs to save money despite evidence from other similar accidents that they posed a serious safety risk.
They also argued that a 1998 federal safety standard for rear impact guards, which featured heavily in Wabash’s defense, did not go far enough and that its limitations were known to manufacturers throughout the trucking industry, some of which had upgraded to more modern four-post designs.
“We hope the decision the jurors reached sends a clear message to the trucking and trailer industry and will finally force them to build safer trailers,” said plaintiff co-counsel Brian Winebright of Cantor Injury Law after the trial.
Wabash, represented at trial by attorneys from Dickinson Wright, repeatedly argued to jurors that an adverse verdict would effectively mean every single rig designed to comply with the applicable federal safety standards would have to be considered unreasonably dangerous, a position they suggested was untenable if federal safety standards are to have any relevance.
CVN screenshot of defense attorney Brian Johnson delivering his closing argument
They stressed that the crash, which their experts argued occurred at 55 miles per hour, would have resulted in fatalities even if the rig employed the most modern four-post rear impact guards.
The defense team placed the blame squarely on the driver, who they said “drove into the back of a trailer in broad daylight” on a clear sunny day, and they emphasized that the human body cannot survive a deceleration from 55 miles per hour to zero “in the same amount of time it takes you to blink your eyes.”
The trial took place before Judge Christopher McGraugh.
The plaintiffs were also represented by Lisa Tsacoumangos of Brown & Crouppen.
The case is captioned Perkins, et al. v. Wabash National Corp., et al., case number 2022-CC00495 in Missouri’s 22nd Circuit Court in the City of St. Louis.
E-mail David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
