The work was done exactly as planned. That was the problem.
An ironworker drowned building a pedestrian bridge to a new college football stadium. He was not improvising. He was not cutting corners. He was doing the work precisely the way the contractor had planned it, staffed it, and sent him into it — over water, without the protections the plan should have required.
That is what made the case simple to state and impossible to defend: when a man dies doing the job exactly as designed, the design is the defendant.
Who controlled safety?
Every construction-death trial turns on one question: who controlled safety, and what did they do with that control? The evidence answered it so completely that the co-defendants sided with the family against the contractor.
The jury found the contractor 100% at fault and returned a verdict of $17,720,000.
What the jurors did afterward
After the verdict, two jurors did something jurors almost never do: they wrote to the family. Twelve strangers heard the whole story, assigned every point of fault where it belonged — and two of them couldn’t leave it in the courtroom.
That is what a fully tried case does. It doesn’t just move money. It fixes responsibility, in public, permanently.
What the evidence showed
- The liability case was built on the contractor’s own planning documents and witnesses.
- The work was performed exactly as the contractor planned and directed it.
- The safety controls the plan should have required over water were not there.
- The co-defendants sided with the family at trial.
- The jury assigned 100% of the fault to the contractor.
- The defense’s highest offer before the verdict was $5,000,000.
The verdict
Co-defendants siding with the family. Jurors writing to them afterward. Some verdicts are numbers; this one was a judgment in every sense.
More from the record
Every case is different. Prior results depend on the facts of the individual case and do not guarantee a similar outcome.