Miami-Dade Jury Returns $65.1 Million for a Boy Killed at a Negligently Wired Bus Shelter

On October 12, 1998, a 12-year-old boy was found dead against a public bus shelter in Miami-Dade County. He had been electrocuted. The shelter was one of thousands owned and operated by Eller Media, the outdoor advertising company whose parent was Clear Channel Communications.

Investigators traced the current to the way the shelter had been wired. The men who did the work were not licensed electricians. They installed the wrong transformer, skipped a fuse that would have cut off a short circuit, and removed the grounding rods meant to carry stray voltage safely into the earth. Over time the insulation rubbed against the metal housing and wore through. That energized the structure with roughly 480 volts. A boy standing at the shelter was killed.

The boy's father, represented by Colson Hicks Eidson, sued Eller Media, Clear Channel, and the electrician who performed the work. Getting the companies to turn over records took a fight of its own. A Florida appellate court had to order Eller Media, Clear Channel, and the electrician to answer the family's discovery requests before the case could move forward. At trial in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, the firm's team, led by Roberto Martinez and Ervin Gonzalez, took the six-member jury through each wiring decision and through how loosely the company had supervised the contractors it paid. Defense lawyers floated the idea that lightning could have struck the boy. The jury did not accept it. After the verdict, the foreman told the Miami Herald that the jurors did not believe lightning had killed the child.

In June 2005, after about a day and a half of deliberation, the jury returned $65.1 million. The award broke down into $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $61 million in punitive damages. It ranked among the largest verdicts in the country that year. The boy's mother had brought her own civil claim and reached a separate settlement.

The death changed how Miami-Dade handles its shelters. The county pulled out and replaced units it considered unsafe, then rewrote its bus-shelter procurement rules. New shelters had to run on low-voltage, self-contained power such as batteries or roof-mounted solar panels rather than hard-wired connections to the street grid.