Los Angeles Jury Awards $29 Million to Pedestrian Hit in Crosswalk
A Los Angeles jury awarded $29,062,351 to Javier Perez, who was 16 when a doctor's car struck him in a crosswalk and left him with a brain injury, finding the driver entirely at fault despite no witnesses or video.
What happened
In 2013, Javier Perez was 16 years old. He was crossing a Los Angeles street inside a marked crosswalk when a car driven by Dr. Caleb David Sunde hit him. The collision caused a head injury that left Perez with a mild neurocognitive disorder, a lasting condition that interferes with memory, attention, and the ability to manage everyday tasks.
Proving who was at fault was the central problem. No independent witness saw the crash, and there was no video of it. Perez had no memory of the moments before or after he was struck, which meant the only firsthand account of the impact came from the driver. Sunde, a practicing physician, refused to accept responsibility. He told the court that Perez had been carelessly riding a skateboard through the crosswalk.
The Dominguez Firm tried the case at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, docketed as case number BC530720. Lead trial attorney Olivier Taillieu, working with Maura Gewirtz and Larry J. Litzky, assembled the liability case from the physical evidence and from the driver's own testimony. He emphasized that a driver bears the duty to yield to a pedestrian who is lawfully inside a crosswalk. With no one to corroborate his client's version of events, Taillieu asked the jury to put the blame entirely on the driver.
"I now leave Mr. Javier Perez in your hands," Taillieu told jurors in his closing.
The jury agreed. On October 26, 2016, after roughly a day of deliberation, it found Sunde 100 percent at fault and found that Perez had not been negligent at all. It set his damages at $29,062,351. The award was sized to cover the medical treatment and daily assistance Perez is expected to need for the rest of his life.
Coverage of the result described it as a record at the downtown courthouse that year for a case involving a mild neurocognitive disorder. Juan Dominguez heads The Dominguez Firm, which handled the matter. At $29,062,351, the verdict placed twelfth on TopVerdict's list of California's top 50 verdicts for 2016.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.