A Parked Garbage Truck, a Hill, and a Thanksgiving Day Crash: $27.3 Million for Shannon Houchin

On Thanksgiving morning 2000, Shannon Houchin was driving to her job at a McDonald's in Smiths Grove, Kentucky. She was 17. As she crested a hill on Girkin Road, the headlights of a 40,000-pound Monarch Environmental garbage truck appeared directly in her lane. The truck's crew had stopped it on the wrong side of the road to avoid dragging garbage cans across the pavement. Shannon swerved to avoid the truck and then again to avoid a pedestrian, and her 1987 Honda Prelude spun sideways into the front of the garbage truck.

The driver's side of Shannon's car took the full impact. She was airlifted to a trauma center and spent 57 days in a coma. When she emerged, the damage was extensive and permanent: involuntary muscle contractions, bilateral third nerve palsy, short-term memory loss, hyperphagia (a memory-related eating disorder), and cognitive deficits requiring around-the-clock care for the foreseeable future.

Tyler Thompson of Dolt, Thompson, Shepherd, Conway and Stanton, PSC filed suit against Republic Services of Kentucky, LLC (doing business as Monarch Environmental) and driver Jackie Jones. At trial, Thompson built the case around a pattern the company had ignored for two years before the crash. He called area residents who had experienced near-collisions with Monarch trucks parked on the wrong side of the road, including incidents as recent as one week before Thanksgiving 2000. The evidence framed Shannon's crash not as a freak accident but as the foreseeable result of a practice the company had been warned about repeatedly and never corrected.

The Warren County jury found Shannon was not at fault and returned a verdict of $27,335,667.87. Warren Circuit Judge Tom Lewis denied Republic's motion for a new trial. No appellate reduction of the award has been reported. The result ranked among the largest personal injury verdicts in Kentucky history.