Texas's Largest Railroad Verdict: $60.5 Million for Friona Family Deaths

In August 1993, Gregorio Gutierrez was driving with his wife and their young son through Friona, a small farming community in Parmer County on the Texas Panhandle, when a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train struck their vehicle at a grade crossing. All three died. The collision occurred in the early morning. The low-angle sun, rising in the east, bore directly into the windshields of drivers approaching from the west. The train crew did not sound the whistle.

Gutierrez had previously worked as a laborer at a Friona-area meatpacking plant. Kevin Glasheen, a personal-injury attorney based in Lubbock, had already represented him in a prior workplace injury matter. After the three deaths, surviving family members retained Glasheen. He took the case on contingency and spent four years building it before a Parmer County jury heard the evidence.

Railroad crossing cases in Texas at the time were frequently defended with federal preemption arguments that limited state-court damages. Glasheen focused instead on two factual failures by the railroad. The first was the absent whistle: federal rules require an engineer to sound a horn on approach to a public at-grade crossing, and the crew had not done so. The second was the documented geometry of the crossing itself. Burlington Northern's own records, Glasheen argued, showed that the company knew, or should have known, that the low morning sun at this particular location created a standing hazard for westbound drivers. Despite that awareness, the railroad had not installed active warning equipment, such as automatic gates or flashing signals, to supplement the static crossbuck signs already in place.

The jury found Burlington Northern liable on both counts. In 1997, the Parmer County jury returned a verdict of $60.5 million for the Gutierrez family, the largest railroad accident jury verdict in Texas history at the time. No reduction, remittitur, or reversal of the award appears in available public records or press coverage.

The case made Glasheen one of the most active railroad crossing litigators in the Southwest. He went on to secure additional multimillion-dollar verdicts in similar crossing-accident cases. The $60.5 million figure was still cited as the state record in Texas railroad litigation nearly fifteen years after the jury delivered it.