Posted on 07/31/2014 4:24:40 AM PDT by markomalley
A Brazos County jury on Wednesday awarded a $27 million in a lawsuit against McDonald’s relating to the 2012 deaths of two Blinn College students. Jurors found McDonald’s negligence to be 97 percent responsible for the deaths of Denton Ward, 18, of Flower Mound, and Lauren Bailey Crisp, 19, of Flower Mound, both of whom died in the early morning hours of Feb. 18, 2012.
The remaining 3 percent of liability was laid on the men who violently attacked Ward and his friend, Tanner Giesen, 21, in the parking lot of the McDonald’s at 801 University Drive.
The jury’s verdict reflects the argument plaintiffs’ attorneys made from the start of the seven-day trial: Had Ward and Giesen not been assaulted at the McDonald’s, the car accident that occurred 11 minutes later while Samantha Bean, another friend, was attempting to get the men to the hospital would not have happened.
And because of a well-documented police record of fights and assaults at the University Drive McDonald’s in the months leading up to the incident, store managers and corporate employees had a duty to hire security to protect patrons.
It was never disputed during the trial that Crisp died in the car accident, but jurors did hear conflicting conclusions from expert witnesses as to Ward’s cause of death.
Two experts who testified for the plaintiffs asserted Ward was killed from injuries suffered while being punched, kicked and stomped on at the McDonald’s, while an expert for the defense — who was the only witness called on by McDonald’s — insisted Ward was fatally injured in the car wreck.
“The thing that sets all of this in motion, and that’s the cause test, is McDonald’s,” said Chris Hamilton, lead plaintiff attorney, in closing arguments.
Hamilton and his co-counsels, Robert Langdon and Jon Miller, spent four days putting on evidence, with much of it focused on establishing a pattern of violence at the McDonald’s and showing the subsequent lack of action taken by company employees.
Carlos Butler, a former McDonald’s general manager and local hip-hop artist, said in a video deposition played for the jury that he was unaware of any of the 20-plus incidents police responded to from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. on the weekends in the 11 months leading up to Ward and Giesen being attacked even though he had been the one to call 911 in at least one instance.
Jurors also saw video testimony from several McDonald’s corporate employees who denied having any knowledge of security issues at the location across from Texas A&M.
“It’s not about what [McDonald’s] knew, it’s about what they didn’t want to know,” Hamilton told jurors. “Their defense is, ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’”
McDonald’s attorneys Marshall Rosenberg and Paul Murphy argued the decisions made by the dead teens and their friends were what led to Crisp and Ward dying.
“Alcohol and consumption of alcohol by teenagers was the root cause,” Murphy said. “I’m not going to do a disservice to anyone and agree to some alternate reality.”
Prior to arriving at the McDonald’s, all four of the friends had been at Hurricane Harry’s drinking and left the bar in Ward’s 4Runner headed to McDonald’s.
Once they arrived, Ward and Giesen went in to use the restroom while Crisp and Bean went through the drive-thru to avoid the large crowd of people, according to testimony.
When the women rounded the corner of the drive-thru, they saw their friends getting beaten, which is when Crisp jumped out to grab Ward, her boyfriend, as Giesen was carried to the car by two unknown women and Bean hopped into the driver’s seat to try and get to the hospital.
In the minutes leading up to the accident, Bean had plenty of opportunity to stop and call for help, Murphy argued.
“They want you to get good and angry at McDonald’s, that’s it,” he said.
The lawsuit was filed by Ward’s mother, Denise Whitaker, and Crisp’s parents, Paul and Nicole Crisp, all of whom testified Friday about how their lives have been affected by the loss of their first-born children.
The jury awarded
$11 million to Whitaker and $11 million to the Crisps for past and future loss of companionship and mental anguish, in addition to $5 million for the pain and mental anguish suffered by Ward, money legally bound for Whitaker.
“This won’t bring the kids back, but it does validate how their parents felt in terms of McDonald’s responsibility,” Hamilton said after the verdict. “I will tell my kids if they go to a McDonald’s at night and they don’t see an off-duty police officer, don’t get out of the car.”
It’s expected McDonald’s will appeal the verdict.
The remaining 3 percent of liability was laid on the men who violently attacked Ward and his friend, Tanner Giesen, 21, in the parking lot of the McDonald’s at 801 University Drive.
This is so bizarre, it defies comprehension.
Does Texas draw jury pools from voter registration records, like most other places?
The next time you decide to sit out an election for purity reasons, remember that every vote possible is needed to cancel out the votes of people like these idiot jurors.
Were they the same jurors who sat on the OJ Simpson trial?
How about personal responsibility...they all four had been drinking...got into a fight??? with someone else...then decided to continue their DUI flight to the hospital because they under aged teens decided not to do the right thing and stop their reckless behavior...and somehow that’s McDonald’s fault???
I must be in Wonderland....but I don’t remember falling into a rabbit hole...or maybe that’s when Obama got elected...and then things got weird....WOW!
Sometimes I am just left wondering what on earth are these jurors thinking???
They can find someone guilty or not, but they can’t handle award amounts at ALL. They are just stupid!
This is the stupid area of Texas, which has both Texas A&M and UT-Austin. It is bordered on the southeast by Sheila Jackson Lee’s congressional district. Enough said.
That's about as nonsensical and as disconnected as one can get in my opinion. JURIES and voter demographics have nothing to do with each other except that juries are usually pulled from voter registrations. You cannot keep registered voters OFF juries simply because your side might win an election somewhere. The problem of uneducated and ignorant juries goes much deeper than this.
When you say "purity" what you really mean are conservatives with principles that refuse to vote for RINOs. And, when they don't, instead of working against Democrats, Liberals and RINO politicians, it's "attack the purists".
Well of course its always the stupid corporations fault. sheesh didn’t need a jury to tell me that.
So where’s the huge law suit against Chicago and a few other cities?
I am in SheJack’s area and the stupidity is rampant.
The lawyers for the plaintifs are scum. Note well that they did not sue the people doing the beating because they could not get money from them. The one and only reason McDonald’s was added to the lawsuit is because they have insurance and could pay the huge amounts awarded. This is actually stealing, a small amount from you and me, in that McDonald’s will have to raise prices slightly to cover the increase in their insurance.
McDonald’s had nothing at all to do with the kid’s deaths.
Bears repeating, yet in our insane legal system they get stuck with this absurd judgment. It's like your having to pay the parents of a kid who was run down in the street in front of your house.
Juries are made up of potential lottery winners!
How can they not adjudge the driver of the 4Runner impaired, and therefore proximate cause? This is nothing but a “deep pockets” decision: find the party with the deepest pockets and hang it on him. Justice be damned.
I have a feeling the McDonald’s lawyer was so certain of a win, he fumbled the ball and the plaintiff’s lawyers were pretty polished. Add that to poor jury instructions and STUPID LAWS that allow such idiotic suits in the first place, the idea it is the insurance companies who pay and they realy deep pockets, and you have a formula which nearly guarantees juries will never get it right.
So, the existence of the parking lot was 97% to blame.
Another OJ jury.... I might might might maybe have laid blame on McDonald’s for about one million each dead (RIP) teenager.
A ridiculous jury award
Yep, Jury saw free money
So now due to this verdict every McDonald’s that is open 2AM has to hire security. And will still get sued in these kind of situations if the security fails to protect against a death by stomping or knives or what have you
“Yep, Jury saw free money”
Their chance to be 0bama for a day. Spending other peoples money like a drunken sailor. The jury can go home and feel fantastic about themselves because they care so much and said it with OPM (other peoples money)
And thus the warped legal theory of Deep Pockets triumphs yet again.
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