$35 Million Settlement for a Family After a Fatal Fort Worth I-35 Crash

The Longoria family settled for $35 million. It is the largest single-plaintiff personal injury settlement on the books in Fort Worth.

Two minutes on the left shoulder

Susana Longoria had been in a small fender-bender and pulled to the left side of Interstate 35 in Fort Worth. She was there about two minutes. Ben E. Keith driver Larry Czaplinski left the road and hit her, and others, on that shoulder. She was killed where she stood. She left her parents and a young daughter.

The stretch of I-35 where this happened is posted “No Trucks in Left Lane.” Czaplinski was in the left lane on the way in.

A reconstruction crew photographed the scene, and we downloaded the truck’s electronic control module, the black box. The throttle was buried at 100 percent coming up to impact. He never put the brakes on. Body-camera video from the Fort Worth officers who worked the crash has him saying he “looked up” right before he hit her. He was not watching the road or the vehicles sitting on the shoulder.

The cameras Ben E. Keith took out

Ben E. Keith denied gross negligence right up toward trial. In the lawsuit we learned the safety department had pulled the dash cameras out of the trucks before this crash. The company used to run a real driver-monitoring setup, cameras facing forward and back. By the night of the wreck, a fleet of about 2,000 vehicles had no cameras at all, because the company decided to remove them.

We deposed Ben E. Keith’s corporate representative. Under oath, he admitted that taking the cameras out made their drivers less safe, and that running a fleet that size with no cameras was well under the industry standard of care.

A phone that was open, and sleep apnea that was not treated

The driver’s phone was active at impact. A forensic examiner imaged two cell phones, a company tablet, and an Apple Watch. An application was open on the company phone when he hit her. Our distracted-driving expert concluded he was distracted.

It was a night crash, so fatigue was the next question. Targeted discovery to medical providers turned up untreated sleep apnea. He had been diagnosed years before and had never been cleared of it. Ben E. Keith was still dispatching him after dark. A sleep expert reviewed the materials and concluded he was fatigued when the crash happened. The phone download lined up with that. He had been awake during the daytime on the weekend before, an inverted schedule stacked on top of the apnea.

If a truck killed someone in your family, call 1-888-839-5444.