A case that began 11 years ago with a fatal crash on an icy stretch of highway near Odessa was ended Friday by the Texas Supreme Court when the justices issued an opinion wiping out a more than $100 million verdict against trucking company Werner Enterprises and its driver.
A Harris County jury had awarded $92 million, plus interest, to Jennifer Blake, who on Dec. 30, 2014, was a passenger with her three children in a pickup truck Trey Salinas was driving on Interstate 20 during a National Weather Service winter storm warning. Salinas lost control of his pickup, careened across a 42-foot-wide grass median and hit the 18-wheeler driven by Shiraz Ali, which was traveling at about 50 miles per hour, according to court documents. The crash killed 7-year-old Zachery and left Blake’s 12-year-old daughter a quadriplegic.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock authored the court’s 29-page opinion rendering judgment in favor of Werner. He wrote that the evidence in the case is “insufficient to establish that the defendant’s negligence was a substantial factor in bringing about the plaintiff’s injuries.”
“The defendant’s presence on the highway, combined with his speed, furnished the condition that made the injuries possible, but it did not proximately cause the injuries,” he wrote. “Rather, the sole proximate cause of this accident and these injuries — the sole substantial factor to which the law permits assignment of liability — was the sudden, unexpected hurtling of the victims’ vehicle into oncoming highway traffic, for which the defendants bore no responsibility.”
Calling the circumstances of the crash “terrible” and “tragic,” Chief Justice Blacklock wrote that “anything the defendant did or didn’t do to contribute to the possibility of such an accident is too attenuated to qualify as the substantial factor necessary for proximate causation.”
“This awful accident happened because an out-of-control vehicle suddenly skidded across a wide median and struck the defendant’s truck, before he had time to react, as he drove below the speed limit in his proper lane of traffic,” he wrote. “That singular and robustly explanatory fact fully explains why the accident happened and who is responsible for the resulting injuries.”
Thomas C. Wright of Wright Close & Barger, who represents Werner and Ali and presented oral arguments on their behalf at the Texas Supreme Court, spoke to The Texas Lawbook Friday, and while he said he was pleased with the outcome, he repeatedly called the facts of the case “tragic.”
“It’s a very tragic set of circumstances, but I did not really see how our client was responsible for the accident,” he said.
Counsel for the Blakes did not respond to a message seeking comment Friday.
The Harris County jury heard 25-days of testimony stretched over six weeks before it determined Werner and Ali were 84 percent responsible, while Salinas, the driver who lost control of his vehicle and veered across the median, was 16 percent responsible. Harris County District Judge Ravi K. Sandill entered final judgment in accordance with the verdict in July 2018.
In Friday’s opinions, three of the court’s justices — Jane Bland, Jeff Boyd and Rebeca Huddle — held they would have remanded the case for a new trial rather than rendering judgment for Werner.
Justice Bland wrote in the 23-page partial dissent that several pieces of evidence could have allowed a reasonable juror to determine that Werner and Ali bore some proportionate responsibility, but she wrote that “no reasonable juror could conclude that Ali was more responsible for the Blakes’ injuries than the driver who lost control in the first place.”
The record contains evidence that Ali was driving too fast for the conditions, that the highway was a “sheet of ice” and that Ali “passed no fewer than three highway accidents on the road to this one,” she wrote.
The jury heard evidence about Ali’s inexperience, his low score on an evaluation by a Werner employee a few weeks before the crash and Ali’s training supervisor being asleep in the truck’s berth.
The jury also heard from a state trooper who ticketed a car for driving at an unsafe speed of 20 to 30 miles per hour on the same stretch of road after it crashed with another vehicle. Ali drove by that crash site minutes before the crash with the Blake family happened.
“However, because some evidence would permit a reasonable jury to conclude that Ali bore some proportionate responsibility for contributing to the Blakes’ injuries, I would remand the case for a new trial,” she wrote.
Justice Bland also wrote that the instructions to the jury were “faulty both overall and with respect to each liability question,” and the proper remedy for that, she wrote, is a new trial.
Justice Evan Young wrote an eight-page concurrence, joined by Justice Huddle, addressing the so-called “admission rule,” which deals with when an employer admits an employee being sued for a tort was acting in the course and scope of employment. When the employer makes such an admission, Justice Young wrote, the rule provides “it is pointless — or worse — to submit wholly derivative claims to the jury.”
“The parties and multiple amici, like the justices of the court of appeals, devoted considerable energy to examining competing perspectives concerning the admission rule’s contours,” he wrote. “Speaking at least for myself, the prominence and importance of that issue played a meaningful role in the Court’s decision to grant the petition.”
Justice Young explained that the purpose of his concurrence is “to sketch some observations about the admission rule.”
“In doing so, of course, I leave open all possible outcomes in future cases,” he wrote. “My hope is that addressing the issues today without finally resolving them will facilitate their presentation when the Court must squarely confront them and thus make it more likely that, when we do, we will do so with a high degree of accuracy.”
In this case, Werner had moved for and was denied a directed verdict at trial, pointing to its admission that Ali was acting within the course and scope of employment when the accident occurred.
“If the employer accepts full responsibility, inflaming a jury by admitting evidence of alleged negligence of multiple employees other than the driver risks inflating damages beyond their actual amount or distorting the attribution of liability (or both),” Justice Young wrote. “At least, that rationale seems persuasive and pervasive in judicial opinions adopting the rule.”
When presented with a question asking it to apportion fault between Werner and Salinas, the jury determined the company was 45 percent at fault and Salinas was 55 percent at fault. But in a later question about negligent hiring and training, the jury assigned Werner 70 percent fault, Ali 14 percent and Salinas 16 percent fault.
The case has an unusual procedural history and languished at the Fourteenth Court of Appeals for nearly five years. After a panel heard arguments but before it issued a decision, five justices voted sua sponte to order en banc reconsideration.
The court split 5-4 in its May 2023 opinion. The five justices in the majority are Democrats who were first elected to the court in November 2018’s “blue wave” and all of whom lost their bids for reelection in 2024.
Amicus briefs were filed or received from Schneider National Carriers, Acuity Insurance, Texas Civil Justice League, American Trucking Association, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Chamber of Commerce of the United States, Texas Trucking Association and the Trucking Industry Defense Association, and Texas Association of Defense Counsel.
Justice Debra Lehrmann did not participate in the decision.
Werner is also represented by R. Russell Hollenbeck and Brian J. Cathey of Wright Close & Barger and Amanda S. Hilty and Dale R. Mellencamp of Bair Hilty.
Blake is represented by Darrin Walker of Kingwood, Eric T. Penn and Kelley Peacock of The Penn Law Firm and Zona Jones and Harrison Steakley of Harrison Davis Morrison Jones.
The case number is 23-0493.