A Larimer County jury has awarded $65 million to the family of a Colorado single mother killed when a truck carrying an improperly loaded excavator struck an I-25 overpass in 2022. Megan Arneson was returning from a water park with her 10-year-old son when falling concrete debris struck her vehicle, killing her. The jury found the truck driver and his employer liable in the wrongful death lawsuit.Kari Jones Dulin, founding partner of Dulin McQuinn Young, LLP, who represented Arneson’s parents in the wrongful death lawsuit, said the $65 million award could never compensate for the loss of their daughter. “No amount of money can make up for this loss,” the attorney told CBS News. The plaintiffs were represented by Kari Jones Dulin, lead counsel, and Travis Young of Dulin McQuinn Young, as well as Dan Caplis and John Kellner of The Dan Caplis Law Firm.
A fun day turned into tragedy
It was supposed to be a fun day for Megan Arneson and her son. She wanted to surprise her son, who was about to start school, with a fun day out. So they went to a water park. But the mother-son day ended on I-25. As they drove home, a truck towing an excavator struck an overpass ahead of them. A chunk of concrete fell onto the road and killed Arneson. Her son was in the back seat.The counsel argued that the excavator had been loaded poorly. Its arm stood almost straight up, and that was what struck the bridge. “This crash was 100% preventable,” Dulin said.Much of the trial focused on the driver, Darnell Yingling. He had just received an unrestricted commercial driving licence. According to Dan Caplis, Yingling told his employer that he wasn’t ready for the interstate. His truck had no height pole, and no one could remember teaching him how to measure a load. Caplis said the company’s own trucking expert agreed that the crash came down to that failure and that the expert kept height poles in his own trucks.Yingling’s employer, Import (Auto Inc.), said Yingling alone was responsible. However, Yingling blamed the company, saying it had never trained him properly. Jones Dulin said that finger-pointing sent a clear message. If no one would accept responsibility for the death, she argued, it could happen again.The jury found both defendants liable and awarded $65 million in non-economic damages. Jurors apportioned 46 per cent of the fault to Import and 52 per cent to Yingling. A non-party, Titan Machinery Inc., was assigned the remaining 2 per cent.Colorado caps non-economic damages in wrongful death cases. By August 2022, the cap had risen to $598,350 following inflation adjustments, according to Jones Dulin. The judge in the case, Chief Judge Daniel St. John II, could reduce the award to that amount.There is one way around the cap. If the judge finds that the defendants committed a “felonious killing”, the limit no longer applies. The plaintiffs have requested such a finding, and the matter is pending.
A loss no verdict can undo
For the family, the lawsuit is not about the money. They wanted to make sure this never happened to anybody else, Jones Dulin told the broadcaster. The loss is irreversible for them. Megan Arneson’s son lost his only parent, and her parents lost their daughter. “I don’t know that words can really describe a loss like that,” Jones Dulin said.John Kellner said the hardest part of the trial was telling the story of Arneson’s son. “He was 10 and in the back seat when his mother was killed, and we had to show the jury what that day did to him without putting him through it again. So we let the people who were there for him tell it. The paramedic who rode with Megan’s son to the hospital described a little boy who kept asking where his mum was and who had to be kept from the answer,” the counsel told Law Week Colorado.After Arneson’s death, her son struggled to cope. “Then the family who stepped in to raise him described the years since: how he goes quiet when he’s missing her, and how big moments like his first football season and homecoming came without his mum there to share them. Our goal was to give the jury a full picture of the loss without turning the courtroom into a spectacle,” Kellner added.Arneson’s son is now a teenager.