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An LA jury ordered DaimlerChrysler to pay about $54 million to the family of a father who was killed by a Dodge truck that backed over him. The panel awarded $50 million in punitive damages and $5.2 million in compensatory damages.
The suit was based on the company's failure to fix a safety defect that caused parked vehicles to unexpectedly go in reverse. In April 2004, the plaintiff suffered fatal head injuries when his unoccupied 1992 Dodge Dakota pickup truck ran him over after he exited it believing it was in park. He tried to dive back in and stop it. Defendant tried to blame the plaintiff for jumping into a moving vehicle while plaintiff's counsel told jurors that DaimlerChrysler "had 20 years to take care of this problem [while] Richard Mraz had two seconds to get this vehicle under control."
The vehicle -- owned by his employer -- had been recalled by the automaker, but Mraz's employer ignored 12 separate recall notices, DaimlerChrysler said. Lawyers for the plaintiff contends that this recall "fix" would not have solved the problem.
The evidence presented at trial showed that DaimlerChrysler had received more than 1,000 park-to-reverse in automatic transmission, complaints -- including complaints with 1988 through 2003 Dodge Dakotas, certain 1988 through 2006 Dodge Rams, and certain 1993 through 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees -- over a period spanning more than a decade before Mr. Mraz was killed.
Beginning in 2000, DaimlerChrysler has conducted three separate recalls on the "park to release issue" in about 2 million vehicles. Several million vehicles with similar issues remain on the road. Lawyers said the vehicles allow drivers to place the gear shift in what appears to be the park position, saying it doesn't move when the brake is released because the vehicle is between gears. From this position, the vehicle can fall into a delayed engagement of powered reverse.
In court, plaintiff showed that senior managers at DaimlerChrysler failed to investigate the full extent of the problem out of fear it could expose it to liability for injuries. At trial, lawyers for Mraz introduced a 1999 memo written by Antonius Brenders, a senior manager in DaimlerChrysler's Vehicle Safety Office that detailed the pros and cons of doing a survey that the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency sought to determine the cause of the park-to-reverse incidents.
The memo stated that a "significant risk" to doing the survey was, it could provide "product liability credence to a hypothesis we have long ignored." Lawyers for Mraz called this a "smoking gun" that showed that DaimlerChrysler "refused to properly investigate the cause of all the accidents for liability reasons." DaimlerChrysler never had its engineers conduct the “root cause analysis,” or utilize the type of design failure mode effects analysis required as vehicle designs change — which would have quickly isolated the failure in its design and identified a proper fix.
DaimlerChrysler said it was considering its legal options, including an appeal.
The jury found Mraz 10 percent responsible, APL -- Mraz' employer --15 percent, and DaimlerChrysler 75 percent responsible in the compensatory phase, but ordered Daimler to pay all $50 million of the punitive damages.
"The accident occurred because Mr. Ma ignored proper safety procedures by exiting a vehicle that was still running then compounding this error by attempting to jump into the vehicle while it was moving," said Louann Van Der Wiele, an assistant general counsel at DaimlerChrysler. "This sad but preventable accident serves as a reminder that drivers should never leave vehicles unattended without shutting off the engine, removing the keys and setting the parking brake -- and they should never attempt to enter a moving vehicle."
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