Orange County Jury Awards $26.3 Million in Yamaha YXZ1000R Rollover Paralysis Case

On August 30, 2020, Justin Van Tussenbrook was riding as a passenger in a 2016 Yamaha YXZ1000R at the Little Sahara Recreation Area in Utah. His uncle was at the wheel. The side-by-side was moving slowly, roughly 5 to 8 miles per hour, when it tipped onto its side and rolled. The vehicle's rollover protection structure, the steel roll cage built to shield the people inside, buckled and collapsed inward. This was not a high speed wreck, and the cage was the one part of the machine meant to hold its shape in a slow tip like this one.

Van Tussenbrook was 21. The collapse drove the cage into the space where he sat. He suffered a spinal cord injury and was left paralyzed. According to the jury's special verdict form, the failure left the occupant survival space almost completely compromised. The lifetime of care that a paralysis injury demands became the largest single piece of the case.

Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger tried the matter in Orange County Superior Court at the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana. Richard Schoenberger, Andrew McDevitt, and Matthew Davis handled the trial for the firm, working as co-counsel with Larry Cook of Casper, Meadows, Schwartz & Cook. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that the YXZ1000R failed to perform as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect and that the risks of its design outweighed any benefit. They also showed the jury that Yamaha had learned the model could fail this way and chose not to recall or retrofit it.

For Casper, Meadows, Schwartz & Cook, this was a second client paralyzed in the same Yamaha off-road model. The earlier matter ended in a confidential settlement.

The jury sided with Van Tussenbrook. It found the vehicle defectively designed and found Yamaha negligent for not recalling or retrofitting the model after the danger became known. In September 2025 it returned a verdict of $26.3 million: $13.95 million for past and future medical expenses, $10 million for noneconomic losses, and $2.39 million for lost earnings. Jurors placed 75 percent of the fault on Yamaha and 25 percent on the uncle who was driving.