A Dallas County jury on Thursday awarded nearly $72 million to the family of an electrician killed in 2019 in a construction accident at a Frito-Lay Inc. facility in Irving.
The award of $71.95 million came on the third day of jury deliberations in a civil suit brought by Laura Lopez, the widow of Hernan Murillo, who was 40 at the time of his death, and their four children.
The jury, which heard testimony in a three-week trial before state District Judge Veretta Frazier of Dallas, assigned the damages against Walker Engineering Inc., a Texas construction services company, and a sister company, Walker Industrial.
According to evidence presented at trial, Murillo was on a construction lift when another worker operating a different lift knocked over Murillo’s machine, sending him tumbling to a concrete floor about 30 feet below. Murillo was killed instantly.
The collision and fall were caught on a Frito-Lay video recording of the construction work.
“This man should not have died when he died. It should not have happened,” Charla Aldous of Aldous Walker in Dallas, one of the lawyers for Murillo’s survivors, told jurors in her closing argument on Tuesday. The family’s suit said Walker Engineering failed to adequately train and supervise workers at the Frito-Lay site.
In addition to Aldous, Lopez and Murillo’s children are represented by Brent Walker and Eleanor Aldous of Aldous Walker and M. Kevin Queenan and Carlos Lopez of Arlington.
After the jury returned its verdict, Charla Aldous said in a written statement: “When this tragedy happened, it deprived a woman of her husband and four children of their dad. Now, nearly five years later, this jury has given the family some measure of justice.”
Lawyers for Walker Engineering did not immediately return a request for comment on the verdict.
The company is principally represented in the lawsuit by Bob Bragalone of Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani and Joseph E. Byrne of Byrne, Cardenas & Aris.
They argued that the accident was the fault of the operator of the lift that collided with Murillo’s and denied that that operator and other employees of the Walker firms had been poorly trained. “There’s a huge difference between failure to train and failure to follow training,” Bragalone told the jury,
Walker Engineering’s lawyers suggested that damages of $6 million may be appropriate; Charla Aldous and her co-counsel sought more than $100 million.
Lopez initially sued Walker Engineering and Frito-Lay and eventually added the operator of the lift that collided with Murillo’s along with other companies, including Walker Industrial. All but Walker Engineering were dismissed before trial. Court records show Lopez reached a settlement with Frito-Lay and the Haskell Company, a general contractor, in 2022. Of the total undisclosed settlement amount, $2.4 million is to be distributed between Murillo’s four children over several years, court records show.
A worker injured in the accident, Jose Javier, and his wife also filed a lawsuit. Court records show they reached a settlement with the Haskell Company in 2022.
The case number in Dallas County District Court is DC-19-16959.