$6.5 Million Settlement for Students Injured in Fatal I-84 School Bus Crash

On January 9, 2010, a school bus carrying 16 students from the Greater Hartford Academy of Mathematics and Science left the highway on Interstate 84 westbound between exits 46 and 45 in Hartford. A 16-year-old Glastonbury driver in a Volvo station wagon sideswiped the left side of the bus, which broke through a guardrail and plunged roughly 20 feet down an embankment, coming to rest beneath the highway. Seventeen people were injured. Vikas Parikh, a 16-year-old Rocky Hill junior and the school's top-ranked student academically, sustained a traumatic head injury and did not survive.

The lawsuits that followed named three defendants: Autumn Transportation, which owned the bus; Paul Burns, the bus driver; and the teenage driver of the Volvo. Post-crash investigation found that Burns lacked the proper license classification to operate a bus of that size. Attorneys for the plaintiffs also alleged Burns had been on his cellphone when the collision occurred.

Andrew Groher, John J. Houlihan Jr., and David W. Cooney of RisCassi and Davis represented five of the 13 plaintiffs, including the family of Vikas Parikh. Eight other plaintiff firms represented the remaining injured students and their families. Together the plaintiffs pursued claims of negligence against all three defendants.

Mediation took place before retired Connecticut Superior Court Judge Jonathan Silbert over two days. On the first day, Judge Silbert held individual meetings with the students and their families. On the second day, the parties reached a resolution. The $6.5 million total settlement was funded by three separate insurance carriers covering the three defendants. Individual allocations among the plaintiffs were not disclosed under a confidentiality agreement.