$10 Million for a Family After a Waste Management Truck Ran a Stop Sign and Killed a Young Mother in Kent County

A Waste Management truck came to a stop sign in Kent County, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, and went straight through it. On the other side of the intersection was a van. The truck struck it. The woman driving the van was 37 years old, and she did not survive the crash.

She was married and the mother of two children. A garbage truck runs a fixed route through streets where families live and drive every day. When the driver of a vehicle that size ignores a stop sign, the people in a passing car have almost no way to protect themselves. That is what happened here, and a young family lost the person at the center of it.

The family brought a wrongful-death claim and hired Cannon & Dunphy, the Milwaukee firm founded by William "Bill" Cannon. A Wisconsin firm taking on a Michigan crash is unusual, and it speaks to the kind of cases Cannon was known for. The claim came down to two questions: did the truck driver cause the collision by failing to stop, and was Waste Management responsible for putting that driver on the road. The answer to both was yes.

To recover for the family, the firm had to fix fault on the truck rather than the woman in the van, and to tie the driver's conduct back to the company that employed him. Commercial-vehicle cases also reach into training, routing, and supervision, the choices a hauler makes before a truck ever leaves the yard. The facts came back to the stop sign the truck did not honor.

The matter resolved as a settlement of $10 million for the surviving family. The result appears in the published obituary of Bill Cannon, which lists it among the notable outcomes of his career, and in the firm's own case results. Because the case settled rather than going to a jury, there was no verdict to appeal and no reduction of the amount.

Cannon died in 2023 at the age of 75. He was credited with more paid verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other attorney in Wisconsin history, and his firm reports recovering more than $1 billion for clients since 1985. The Michigan case put another $10 million in the hands of a husband and two children who had lost their wife and mother.