Birmingham Jury Returns $12 Million Against MAX Transit After Bus Driver With Two Prior Fainting Episodes Blacked Out and Rolled a Bus Into a Ravine

On February 9, 2015, a MAX Transit bus operated by the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority was running its route through Fairfield, Alabama, with more than twenty passengers aboard. Behind the wheel was Reginald D. Thomas. Somewhere along the route, Thomas lost consciousness. The bus left the road, overturned, and came to rest in a ravine.

One passenger, Charlsye Williams, saw the driver going under and ran to the front of the bus, trying to reach the controls before it went over. She paid for it with her leg: her right foot and ankle were mangled so badly in the rollover that surgeons had to amputate below the knee. Other passengers up and down the bus suffered injuries of varying severity in the crash.

What turned the case from an accident into an indictment of the transit authority was what the litigation uncovered about Thomas's history. Evidence presented at trial showed he had passed out twice before while operating MAX buses in the Birmingham area, and that the authority, aware of both episodes, had taken no meaningful action and kept him driving passengers.

Fifteen of the crash victims sued in Jefferson County Circuit Court, in a case captioned Charlsye Williams, et al. v. Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority and Reginald D. Thomas, tried before Judge Annetta Verin. Sara Williams and Brandon Bishop of Alexander Shunnarah's Birmingham firm represented ten of the fifteen plaintiffs.

On December 11, 2017, the jury returned a $12 million verdict against the transit authority and its driver. Six million dollars of the award was punitive, the jury's answer to an agency that had twice been warned its driver was blacking out behind the wheel and put him on the road anyway.