Duval County Jury Faults Ford Explorer Roof and Seatbelt in Fatal Rollover

In May 2001, a young woman was driving her 2000 Ford Explorer on Interstate 95 in Virginia when a Winnebago merged into her lane. She steered to avoid it, lost control, and the Explorer rolled five times.

The driver, a chemical engineer and a pharmacy graduate student at the University of Florida, did not survive. During the rolls the roof caved down to the back of her seat. The B-pillar folded, and that deformation fed roughly seven inches of slack into her seatbelt. With the belt no longer holding her in place, her head struck the outside of the roof rail. She had been married about two and a half years.

Her husband brought a product-liability case, and Pajcic & Pajcic took it to a four-week trial in Duval County Circuit Court in Jacksonville. The firm did not argue that the Explorer was prone to rolling over. It argued something narrower: that when a rollover does happen, the vehicle has to protect the people inside, and this one did not.

To build that case the firm spent more than $500,000 on crash tests, expert analysis, and demonstrative evidence, including a full-scale courtroom model of the Explorer and more than 940 digitized exhibits. Internal Ford documents showed that engineers had made the Explorer roof weaker during two redesigns in the 1990s. The plaintiff's lawyers told the jury that Ford had designed the roof down to the minimum federal standard even though a stronger roof would have given occupants more protection.

The jury agreed. It returned $10,184,315 for the husband and found that the roof collapse caused his wife's death. The award was the first against Ford in a case built solely around defects in the Explorer's roof and the related seatbelt system, rather than the vehicle's tendency to roll. No reduction or appellate reversal of the verdict appeared in the coverage of the case.

After the verdict, the husband said his aim was to push Ford to build the Explorer with a stronger roof and better seatbelts so that other families would not lose someone the same way.