$462 Million Verdict Against Trailer Maker Wabash in a Fatal St. Louis Underride Crash

On the afternoon of May 19, 2019, a Volkswagen CC was traveling on Interstate 44/55 near the 7th Street exit in St. Louis when it struck the rear of a tractor-trailer. The trailer's rear impact guard, the steel bar meant to stop a car from sliding underneath, tore away on contact. The car went beneath the trailer. Both men inside were killed.

The driver, Taron Tailor, was 30. His passenger, Nicholas Perkins, was 23. Both were fathers. Their families brought a product-liability case against Wabash National, the company that built the 2004 trailer, arguing that the guard should have held.

The case went before a jury in the Circuit Court for the City of St. Louis in September 2024, after an earlier trial ended in a mistrial in 2023. Plaintiffs' counsel included John G. Simon and John M. Simon of The Simon Law Firm, Brian Winebright of Cantor Injury Law, and Lisa Tsacoumangos of Brown & Crouppen, who served as co-counsel. They told the jury that Wabash had used the same two-post guard design for close to 30 years without effective crash testing, and that it had passed up safer designs to hold down costs. One estimate put the savings at roughly $15 million a year.

The defense pointed out that the guard met the minimum federal safety standard in place when the trailer was built. The plaintiffs answered that the standard was decades out of date and that Wabash already had evidence its guard failed in real crashes.

After a two-week trial, the jury found Wabash 65 percent at fault and Tailor 35 percent at fault. It set compensatory damages at $6 million for each man's family and added $450 million in punitive damages, a figure the plaintiffs tied to what Wabash had saved by leaving the design alone. The total came to $462 million.

Wabash disputed the result. The company said it respectfully disagreed with the verdict, said it was evaluating its legal options, and maintained that no rear impact guard then in existence would have changed the outcome. In post-trial rulings reported in early 2025, the trial judge denied Wabash a new trial but cut the punitive award from $450 million to $108 million. The compensatory damages stayed in place, bringing the judgment down to about $119.5 million.