Plaintiff wins $250,000 for lingering elbow injury after crash

A St. Louis accident left a man with elbow injuries and a $250,000 verdict against the driver of a box truck.

“It was a pretty good crash,” said Ben Sansone of Sansone & Lauber. “The box truck actually flipped over.”

Sansone said that his client, Geoffrey Crowley, was hurt in the collision when truck driver, Dan Rabbit, ran a red light and T-boned him. Crowley suffered injuries to the neck, back and arm. The neck and back problems eventually cleared up, but Crowley contended that his elbow troubles continued.

“Basically, it is tennis elbow,” said Sansone, who noted the tendon was starting to pull away from the bone. “About a year in, they did an MRI and realized this tendon needed to be surgically repaired.”

Tracy Cowan of Lewis Brisbois, which represented the defendant, said he felt the verdict was a good result. He spoke with jurors and he thinks they felt the damages were exaggerated.

“They thought that, for what his injuries were, and for what he was still doing, he was just trying to take advantage of a bad situation essentially,” Cowan said. “He continued to lead a very active lifestyle and posted tons of it on Twitter and social media.”

Cowan said he raised the possibility of comparative fault in his opening statement, but the judge did not allow an instruction on that defense to go to the jury.

Sansone said he believes that the other side’s initial contention that Crowley shared some blame for failing to anticipate Rabbit’s violation of the traffic signal may have hurt the defense’s case.

“The joke I made to the jury was that [my client] ran a green light,” he said.

There was disagreement over the final pretrial demand in the case. Sansone said it was $300,000 but Cowan recalled it as $650,000. Sansone said the latter figure was a comment made in jest during jury deliberations.

Brent Sumner of Sumner Law was also listed as representing the plaintiff. He said that jurors told him after the verdict they did not believe the defense that the crash did not cause the injuries to plaintiff and necessitate his subsequent elbow surgery.

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