$11.95 Million Verdict for Worker Left with Severe Brain Injury After Highway 41 Collision

On the morning of October 17, 2017, Luis Viruegas was riding as a passenger in an Isuzu box truck on State Route 41 near the Friant Road off-ramp in Fresno. He and his coworker, driver Steven Rodriguez, were traveling together for work when the truck came upon a California state employee vehicle stopped in the No. 3 slow lane of the freeway. The state driver had backed up more than 120 feet on the highway to retrieve a shelving unit that had fallen onto the freeway from a local business's vehicle. Rodriguez had no time to stop. The box truck struck the parked state vehicle at highway speed.

The force of the crash was severe enough that firefighters needed the Jaws of Life to cut Viruegas, Rodriguez, and a third coworker out of the wreckage. Viruegas, who was 29 years old at the time, suffered a traumatic brain injury along with fractures throughout his body. He spent roughly two months hospitalized before transferring to a brain injury rehabilitation facility in Bakersfield, where he remained for more than a year.

By the time of trial, Viruegas could no longer work and required between 12 and 24 hours of daily care. Attorneys Douglas Gordon and Lyndsie Russell of Miles, Sears and Eanni built the case around the state employee's decision to reverse well over a hundred feet on a live freeway, positioning the stopped vehicle directly in the path of oncoming traffic. The defense challenged whether Viruegas would have fared differently had he been wearing a seatbelt. The plaintiff countered that the impact pushed the cab structure into his seating area so severely that belt use would not have changed the outcome.

The jury sided with Viruegas on the central question of fault, assigning 75 percent of responsibility to the state employee and finding he was acting within the scope of his employment at the time. The jury placed 20 percent of fault on Viruegas for not wearing a seatbelt and 5 percent on driver Rodriguez. The gross verdict was $11,955,702. After applying the comparative fault reductions, the award reflected the jury's conclusion that the state's conduct was the primary cause of the collision and the catastrophic harm that followed.