Jefferson County Jury Returns $10 Million for Pedestrian Killed in Birmingham Hit-and-Run

Just after midnight on August 13, 2014, Angela Marie McCall was on foot in the 9500 block of Parkway East, on the northeast side of Birmingham near Center Point. A black Pontiac Grand Prix came down the road at close to 60 miles per hour, ran up over the curb, and hit her. She was 34 years old, and she did not survive.

The driver did not stop. Police said he pulled out a gun and threatened the witnesses standing nearby, then pried the license plate off his car and drove away. That left investigators working a fatal hit-and-run with no tag to trace. Within days they identified the driver as 25-year-old Sylvester Taylor and secured warrants charging him with manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. Taylor turned himself in to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and was held at the county jail.

McCall was a mother of three. By the time the civil case reached a courtroom, her children had grown into their late teens and early twenties, raised in the years after her death by relatives, including an aunt. Their wrongful death claim moved through Jefferson County's civil court on its own track, apart from the criminal charges against the man who hit her.

Cory Watson Attorneys represented McCall's estate. The firm's account of the crash matched what witnesses had described to police: a car driven well over a safe speed, a driver who lost control and mounted the curb where McCall was walking, and a flight from the scene that included a threat at gunpoint. The estate alleged that the driver had been both intoxicated and speeding when the Grand Prix struck her.

The trial lasted two days. F. Jerome Tapley, Hirlye Ryan Lutz, J. Curt Tanner, and Adam W. Pittman handled the case for the family. The jury weighed the conduct behind the crash, the decision to flee, and the harm to three children left without their mother.

In 2018, the Jefferson County jury returned $10 million in punitive damages. TopVerdict, which tracks large jury awards nationwide, listed the result under the caption Watts v. Taylor and ranked it seventh among the top pedestrian accident verdicts in the United States that year.