Alameda County Jury Returns $18.5 Million Verdict in Fresno Truck Crash

Just after midnight on October 24, 2019, Juanita Cerrato was driving on Jensen Avenue in Fresno, California, when a tractor-trailer loomed across her path. The rig, operated by Ye Wang for Yong's Logistics, sat blocking the shoulder and part of her lane, and its headlights were aimed back at oncoming traffic. The glare kept Cerrato from making out the obstruction until she was nearly on top of it. She swerved to avoid the trailer and crashed.

The wreck left Cerrato with a traumatic brain injury. Her condition was serious enough that, when the lawsuit was filed in February 2020, it had to be brought on her behalf through a guardian ad litem, Joseph Cerrato. The named defendants were Yong's Logistics, Inc., an Oakland-based carrier, and Wang, the driver who had stopped the trailer in the roadway.

Christopher Dolan of the San Francisco firm Dolan Law Firm took the case over from another firm well after the crash. The road to trial was steep. The claim fell under California's Proposition 213, which caps what certain drivers can recover, the police findings did not favor Cerrato, and the defense held unfavorable evidence about her that it planned to use at trial. Only a $1 million insurance policy was available, and the defense never put an offer on it.

The case reached an Alameda County jury in April 2025, and the trial ran about six weeks. Much of the fight happened before the jury weighed in. Dolan moved to keep the defense's experts off the stand, and the court excluded four of them and sharply cut back the testimony of three more. With that opinion evidence gone or narrowed, the firm argued that Wang and Yong's Logistics created the hazard themselves by leaving the trailer across the road with its lights blinding approaching drivers, then asked the jury to hold the company fully responsible for a crash it called preventable.

The jury agreed. On May 16, 2025, it returned a verdict of $18,574,222 for Cerrato against Yong's Logistics, more than eighteen times the $1 million policy the defense had declined to pay.