King County Jury Awards $72 Million to Two Plaintiffs in Monsanto PCB Case at Sky Valley School

Sky Valley Education Center, a public school in Monroe, Washington, was built in the late 1960s. Like many schools of that era, it was fitted with fluorescent light fixtures whose ballasts contained polychlorinated biphenyls, a class of industrial chemicals that Monsanto manufactured under the trade name Aroclor. PCBs were banned for most uses in 1979, but the contaminated fixtures remained in place long after that. Two former students who attended Sky Valley alleged they were exposed to PCBs through those fixtures and developed chronic neurological conditions as a result.

The two plaintiffs sued Monsanto (now operating through its parent company Bayer and the successor entity Pharmacia LLC) in King County Superior Court, case number 18-2-54572-2, alongside five other plaintiffs whose claims were consolidated for trial. They argued Monsanto had known for decades that PCBs were toxic and persistently contaminating, yet continued to sell the product and failed to warn users of the risks.

The trial team for the plaintiffs included Darrell Cochran, Colleen Durkin Peterson, Andrew Ulmer, Michael Pfau, Thomas Vertetis, and Alexander Dietz of Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala, working alongside Richard Friedman, Sean Gamble, Henry Jones, and Ronald Park of Friedman Rubin PLLP. The jury heard evidence that the ballasts released PCBs into the air over years of normal operation and that the company supplied a product that was unreasonably dangerous as designed, unreasonably dangerous as constructed, and sold without adequate warnings.

On July 14, 2023, the jury returned a verdict of $72 million for the two plaintiffs. It assigned $12 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages. The jury deadlocked on the claims of the five remaining plaintiffs in the consolidated group. Judge Jim Rogers presided over the proceeding in King County Superior Court.

The $72 million award was one of several nine-figure and near-nine-figure verdicts returned by King County juries in related Sky Valley litigation. Multiple trials from 2022 through 2023 produced combined verdicts exceeding $700 million against Monsanto across dozens of plaintiffs who attended or worked at the school. In August 2025, Monsanto reached agreements in principle to resolve more than 200 remaining Sky Valley cases, while prior adverse verdicts in the litigation remained on appeal and were not covered by that resolution. The status of the July 2023 verdict within the ongoing appellate proceedings had not been publicly resolved as of that date.