Harris County Jury Awards $917,874 to Injured Couple in Contested Causation Case

A motor vehicle collision in Harris County, Texas, left Frank M. Gabeletto and Candace Gabeletto with bodily injuries that would not be resolved for nearly four years. The Gabelettos filed suit in 2019 in the 133rd District Court of Harris County, naming Esther Steinfield Freedman, a private individual with no corporate co-defendant, as the driver responsible for their harm. The case was docketed as Cause No. 2019-54355.

Settlement negotiations stretched into a standstill. The Gabelettos held firm and would not accept any figure below seven digits, and Freedman's side did not close that gap. As the years passed without resolution, both parties moved toward trial. By 2023, the case was set before Judge Jaclanel McFarland in the 133rd District Court. Robert C. Alden of Byrd Davis Alden & Henrichson, based in Austin, carried the matter to the courtroom for the plaintiffs.

The defense built its two-week trial presentation around causation. Freedman's attorneys argued that the collision had not produced the physical conditions the Gabelettos described, positioning the accident and the claimed injuries as separate events rather than cause and effect. Medical evidence on the relationship between the forces of the crash and the severity of the harm the plaintiffs attributed to it became the central contest. The defense did not dispute that a collision had occurred; what it contested was whether Freedman's conduct caused the Gabelettos' conditions.

Alden presented the Gabelettos' documented medical history and ongoing physical limitations to the jury and asked for $16 million in total damages. On April 13, 2023, the jury returned a plaintiff's verdict of $917,874. The award came in well below the demand, reflecting the jury's weighing of the causation evidence, but it held Freedman legally responsible for the Gabelettos' bodily harm. No post-trial reduction appears in the publicly available record.

TopVerdict, the independent verdict-ranking publication, placed the result at No. 23 on its editorial list of the top 50 personal injury jury verdicts in Texas for 2023, covering all case types tried to a jury verdict in the state that calendar year.