St. Johns County Jury Awards $4 Million in Nocatee Parkway Cyclist's Death

On the morning of October 8, 2012, Jared Bynum was riding his bicycle east on Nocatee Parkway in St. Johns County, training for an Ironman triathlon. He was 30 years old and lived in Jacksonville. An SUV driven by Shannon Brink, then 21, came up behind him in the same eastbound lane and hit him. Bynum was pronounced dead at the scene.

The blame did not fall on the driver alone, at least not at first. Brink told investigators the sun was in her eyes and that she never saw him. Traffic investigators split the fault in their report. They wrote that Brink should have been more careful, but they also faulted Bynum, saying a cyclist did not belong on the parkway and that he should have been riding closer to the edge of the road. That finding hung over the case, because it suggested the man who was killed had helped cause his own death.

Kelli Bynum, his widow, hired Seth Pajcic to bring a wrongful death suit. At trial in St. Johns County Circuit Court, Pajcic argued the road itself was a trap. There were no signs telling cyclists the parkway was off limits, and he put primary responsibility on the engineer who designed the roadway and its signage. He also showed the jury that it was Brink, not Bynum, who had failed in the basic duty to watch the road ahead.

On April 27, 2017, the jury returned a $4 million verdict for Kelli Bynum. It assigned no fault to Jared Bynum, so the award was not reduced for any comparative negligence on his part. The jurors placed primary responsibility on the design engineer for the missing warning signs and assigned no fault to the community's developer.

"I feel like his name was cleared," Kelli Bynum said after the verdict. Pajcic said the jury had rejected the idea that Bynum was to blame and had spoken plainly about the rights of cyclists who share the road.

Nocatee Parkway now carries signs warning that bicycles are prohibited on the road.