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By David Gammill, trial counsel in this case · Last reviewed: August 20, 2026
Before trial, the State of California’s settlement offer was $10,000. After a ten-day jury trial in Los Angeles County, the jury returned a verdict of $21,169,685 for the wrongful death of a 33-year-old husband and father, killed when his car struck a freeway crash cushion that should have protected him and could not, because it was already collapsed. This is the story of how that case was built and tried. Every case is different, and no past result guarantees any future outcome.
In the early morning of March 6, 2016, a 33-year-old accountant was driving home westbound on the 134 freeway in Glendale. He had spent the evening supporting a close friend whose band was playing nearby. He was a husband of five years, the father of an 11-month-old girl, and he was set to start a new job that Monday as a financial controller, handpicked by an employer who knew the quality of his work.
It had rained all night. On a wet freeway, following a friend’s car home, he lost control. His sedan spun and slid, driver’s door first, into the end of a crash attenuator guarding a bridge column. He never regained consciousness, and he died within the hour.
A crash attenuator, or crash cushion, is a row of connected metal bays installed in front of rigid freeway hazards. Hit one end-on and it collapses section by section, absorbing the crash energy so the driver survives. Hit it from the side and it works like a guardrail, redirecting the car away from the hazard. Either way, it only works if it is extended. A crash cushion that is already collapsed is, in the words of the State’s own witnesses at trial, just a blunt object, no different from the bare hazard it was installed to protect.
Our case was that this crash cushion was already fully collapsed when his car reached it, crushed weeks earlier by another driver and never reset, so that what should have been a survivable spin into a cushion and a guardrail became a fatal impact with a wall of compressed steel.
No camera recorded the crash cushion in the days before the collision, so we built the proof from converging, independent evidence:
The State of California did not accept responsibility. It argued that no witness ever saw the cushion collapsed before that night, and it argued that the man who died was the cause of his own death: that he had been drinking, and that he was driving too fast for the rain. Cases like this are won or lost on cross-examination, and three of them decided this one.
The State’s alcohol theory rested on a single number: a .082 reading from blood collected 19 days after his death, pooled in the chest cavity rather than drawn from the heart or a vessel, a source the toxicology testimony established limits what any scientist can conclude from it. On direct examination, the State’s toxicologist presented that number to the jury with confidence. The cross-examination took it apart piece by piece.
By the time she left the stand, the State’s own expert had conceded, under oath, that she could not say what his blood alcohol level actually was while he was driving. That her estimate was not a scientific certainty. That the level could have been as low as .04, below the point where any signs or symptoms would even be observable. And the concession that undid the theory entirely: that in the range she estimated, most people would show no effect at all on reaction time or visual acuity, the only faculties that mattered on a rain-slick freeway. The number the State built its defense on came out of cross-examination as no number at all.
On speed, the defense fared no better. The friend he was following testified both cars traveled at 50 to 55 miles per hour the entire way, and the crash physics matched that account, not the State’s.
Caltrans’s maintenance superintendent, the man whose crews were responsible for this crash cushion, assured the jury the State watched its equipment closely: inspections weekly at a minimum, with his crews trying to check daily. The cross-examination then held that assurance up against his own files. No inspection logs. No repair orders. No communications. Nothing for this crash cushion in the two years before the crash, and nothing documenting the inspections he had just described. A standard is not a defense; it is a promise, and the State’s own records showed the promise was not kept.
Step by step, the cross-examination then walked him to the admission at the center of the case: a collapsed crash cushion is a fixed object, a blunt object, and blunt objects in the roadway are dangerous. The State’s own superintendent agreed with each step, which meant the State’s own witness had described the dangerous condition the jury would later find.
And there was one more thing. Nine months after the death, Caltrans’s own maintenance records showed a repair to this same crash cushion, and publicly available street imagery showed it sitting substantially collapsed for at least eight days before that repair, while the superintendent’s weekly-or-better assurances were on the record. The jury saw the assurance and the reality side by side. As we put it in closing argument: “I take no issue with weekly. That’s their standard… But now, what are we doing to make sure we actually abide by our own standard, the State of California? The answer is nothing.”
The State’s traffic engineer brought the jury a photograph of the crash cushion standing extended, dated February 20, 2016, about two weeks before the fatal crash. If that date was right, the photograph was a serious problem for the case: the neighbor put the earlier crash two to three weeks before the fatal one, and a cushion standing intact on February 20 would have contradicted her account.
The date was not right. The cross-examination put the engineer’s photograph next to the identical image from Google Earth: the same cars, in the same positions, in the same colors. Google’s own date on that image was February 2, 2016, weeks earlier and before the earlier crash the neighbor described. Pressed on it, the engineer conceded the image appears to be from February 2 and that it was possible his date was wrong. When the State later fought to keep the side-by-side comparison out of the jury room, the court overruled the objection: the jury had already seen it.
Then came the number the jury would ask to hear again. The engineer agreed that Caltrans has limited resources and weighs the cost of safety work against its benefit. So the cross-examination asked a simple question: what value does Caltrans itself put on a fatal accident? Shown the State’s own cost tables to refresh his memory, the engineer confirmed the figure: $10.8 million. That is a planning number the State uses when it decides which safety projects are worth building, not an appraisal of any lawsuit. But the jury now had both of the State’s numbers in front of it. Its own tables valued a fatal accident at $10.8 million. Its offer to this family had been $10,000.
California law gives public entities a defense called design immunity. In plain terms, it can protect the government from liability for a road hazard when the hazard comes from a plan or design the government approved before construction. Raised successfully, it can end a dangerous road case even when the danger was real.
On the Friday before closing arguments, the court granted the State part of that shield, taking a piece of the design immunity question away from the jury. We did not accept that ruling as final. Over the weekend, we pressed the court to reconsider, and on Monday morning, before closings, the court reversed itself, calling its own Friday ruling “improvidently granted,” and gave the question back to the jury.
The jury then took the shield away for good. On the special verdict, it found that the plan or design was not a substantial factor in causing his death. The immunity failed. This is what trying a case against the government actually means: the State had every incentive to make the trial about the victim, and the answer was not outrage. It was cross-examination, evidence, and refusing to treat a bad ruling as the end of the argument.
The closing argument ended with a simple request to the jury: “I’m asking you for justice for this family.”
The jury deliberated for the rest of that day and all of the next. Late on the second afternoon came its final request of the trial. The jurors did not ask to re-hear an expert opinion or a piece of the closing. They asked the court reporter to read back part of the cross-examination of the State’s traffic engineer: the passage that began with Caltrans’s limited resources and ended with the $10.8 million its own tables assign to a fatal accident. The next morning at 9:12, the reporter read those pages back, and the jurors returned to their deliberations. At 11:45 that same morning, they announced they had reached a verdict.
The jury found yes on each element of a dangerous condition of public property: the crash cushion was in a dangerous condition, the condition created a reasonably foreseeable risk of exactly this kind of injury, the State had notice long enough to protect against it, and it was a substantial factor in causing his death. The jury awarded $533,299 in past economic damages, $2,636,386 in future economic damages, and $18,000,000 in non-economic damages to his wife and daughter: $21,169,685 in all, in a case the State had offered to settle for $10,000.
If you lost someone to a dangerous road, a failed guardrail, or any hazard on public property, four lessons from this verdict matter to you.
Who can bring a wrongful death claim, and how the family’s claim and the estate’s claim fit together, is covered in our CCP § 377.60 explainer and on our Torrance wrongful death attorney page.
If you lost someone you love in a crash involving a dangerous road condition or a public entity anywhere in California, the six-month clock may already be running. Get your free case evaluation or call 310-750-4149. There are no upfront legal fees; a fee is collected only if we win, under a written contingency fee agreement that complies with California law.
Disclaimer: This page describes a specific case tried to verdict in July 2021. Its facts, parties, and circumstances are unique, and the result does not constitute a guarantee, warranty, or prediction regarding the outcome of any other matter. Details are drawn from the public trial record; family names are omitted out of respect for the family’s privacy. This page is attorney advertising.