Cook County Jury Awards $29.6 Million to Passenger Injured in 2005 Metra Derailment

On the morning of September 17, 2005, a five-car bi-level Metra Rock Island train pulled out of Joliet bound for downtown Chicago with roughly 185 commuters aboard. At about 8:30 a.m., as it neared the city, it reached a track crossover posted for 10 mph. The train hit that crossover at 69 mph. Cars left the rails and crumpled against each other. Two passengers were killed and more than 100 were hurt.

Federal investigators put the cause on the engineer. The National Transportation Safety Board found that he failed to slow the train as it crossed from one track to another, taking a slow-speed switch at nearly seven times the posted limit. The brief tied the derailment to human error rather than any failure of the track or the cars.

Renea Poppel was 25, a Lewis University graduate riding in from Midlothian to a new job as an admissions counselor at Kaplan University. She was about three months pregnant. The derailment left her with a traumatic brain injury, a broken neck, and a fractured pelvis. She came through more than 20 surgeries. She uses a wheelchair, cannot taste or smell, has trouble regulating her body temperature, and needs care around the clock.

Corboy & Demetrio was appointed lead counsel for the injured riders and the families of the dead, eventually representing 36 people from the wreck. Thomas Demetrio and William Gibbs handled Poppel's case, which went to a two-week jury trial in Cook County Circuit Court before Judge Thomas H. Hogan. They laid out the recorded speed, the 10 mph limit on the crossover, and the federal findings, then walked the jury through what round-the-clock care would cost Poppel for the rest of her life.

Before trial, Metra had offered her about $16 million. The jury went well past that figure. In 2009 it returned $29.6 million, the largest verdict in Illinois for a single person injured in a mass-transit crash.

The firm went on to resolve the remaining claims from the derailment, recovering more than $44 million in total. That included $11 million for the families of the two passengers who were killed.