A Stop-Sign Crash in Bartow County and a $14 Million DeKalb Verdict

On Friday, July 27, 2018, a Toyota Avalon failed to stop at the sign where Towe Chapel Road meets Georgia Highway 140, between Adairsville and Rydal in Bartow County. The car pulled into the path of a Ford F-150 pickup, and the two vehicles collided. Everyone in the Avalon was killed. The three people in the pickup were treated for minor injuries and released.

The car held four people, including a six-year-old boy who had spent the day with his grandmother. His grandmother died in the wreck. So did the driver, an acquaintance of hers who had run the stop sign, and a fourth passenger. The boy was the youngest of the four.

The driver carried only a $25,000 auto policy through Direct General, the minimum Georgia requires. The boy's parents sent a time-limited demand for those limits, and the insurer did not pay within the deadline. After that, the parents took the position that the policy limit no longer controlled the case and that the open question was the full value of their son's life.

Christopher Evans and Polina Denissova sued the estate of the driver, Shannon Hartsfield, for wrongful death, and they added claims for attorney's fees on the argument that the defense had been stubbornly litigious. Bill Parker of Montlick represented the father. Bruce Hagen and his son Matthew Hagen, of Hagen Rosskopf, represented the mother. The case was docketed as Evans v. Hirsh, No. 20A82655, in the State Court of DeKalb County at Decatur.

The defense conceded that the crash was Hartsfield's fault, so the trial was about damages alone. According to Bruce Hagen, the hardest part was getting a jury to put a number on a young life. "We tried to focus the trial on the human loss," he said. Much of the plaintiffs' proof came from an economist who testified about the boy's likely future, drawing on early signs of his promise in school, and the family testified about what they had lost. At closing, the plaintiffs asked for $48 million. The defense asked for $4.5 million.

The trial opened on July 18, 2023, before Chief Judge Wayne Purdom. The jury deliberated for under two hours the following day and returned $14 million, with the non-economic damages set at nearly twice the economic damages. The defense declined to comment and did not say whether it would appeal.