Gursten Wins $3.9 Million for the Family of Patrick Nunez, Killed by an Out-of-Service Gravel Truck

On Interstate 75 in Detroit, a fully loaded gravel hauler operating for Utica Transit Mix and Supply slammed into the vehicle Patrick Nunez was driving. A loaded gravel truck weighs in the tens of thousands of pounds, and the force of the collision killed him.

Nunez's family retained Steven M. Gursten of Michigan Auto Law and filed a wrongful death claim against the trucking company in Macomb County, where the operation was based. Rather than treat the case as a single bad moment in traffic, Gursten looked at the truck itself and the man the company had put behind the wheel.

The driver's own deposition supplied the proof. Under oath, he testified that he had a seizure disorder and was taking Tegretol, a prescription epilepsy medication known to cause drowsiness and to slow reaction time. He also said the company had given him no real training and no meaningful supervision before sending him out in a commercial rig.

The same testimony covered the truck. The driver acknowledged that the gravel hauler was out of service in more than five separate ways. In commercial trucking, "out of service" is a formal safety designation: it means a vehicle carries defects serious enough that state and federal rules bar it from the road until the problems are fixed. By the driver's own account, the truck met that standard several times over on the day of the crash.

Taken together, those admissions reframed the claim. The question was no longer whether one driver had misjudged a few seconds of traffic. It was why a company had allowed a sedated, untrained driver to take an unroadworthy truck onto a busy interstate at all. That is the case Gursten pressed against Utica Transit Mix and Supply.

The parties settled, in a matter captioned Nunez v. Utica Transit Mix and Supply, for $3.9 million. Because the case resolved by negotiated settlement rather than a jury verdict, no trial award was ever entered, so there was nothing for a court to reduce or remit on appeal. Michigan Lawyers Weekly reported the $3.9 million figure as the largest Michigan settlement recorded for 2008.