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A Pulaski County jury says Hyundai Motor Co. must pay over $14 million to a man who sustained permanent brain damage in a February 2010 wreck.

Keith and Vanessa Duncan sued the car manufacturer on Gage Duncan’s behalf because the driver side air bag did not deploy when the 2008 Hyundai Tiburon Gage was driving struck a tree alongside Belspring Road. He was 16 years old at the time and sustained serious damage to the frontal lobes of his brain, according to Duncan’s attorney, Ari Casper.

A mistrial was declared in the case last year when a jury was unable to reach a decision following three weeks of testimony. Almost two weeks of trial this time around did not pose a stumbling block as a three-woman, four-man jury returned a verdict in Duncan’s favor.

In its verdict, the jury found that Hyundai “breached the implied warranty of merchantability” on the Tiburon and that as a result, Gage Duncan suffered irreversible brain injuries when the bag did not deploy.

As a result, the jury ruled that Hyundai should pay $14 million in damages to cover almost $2 million in projected lost wages over Gage’s lifetime and nearly $11 million in projected future medical expenses. The company also was ordered to pay $140,000 in medical expenses incurred since the wreck.

According to a summary of evidence each side presented the jury in closing arguments, the plaintiff (Duncans) contend the driver side air bag should have deployed when the Tiburon slid driver side first into the tree, but that it did not because the sensor was improperly placed under the driver seat.

Hyundai argued that the sensor was properly placed in the car and that it had performed properly in crash tests that gave it a four-out-of-five star safety rating under Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. In fact, Hyundai attorneys Tim Kirkner and Harlan Prater told the jury the vehicle was safer than required by standards at that time because side air bags weren’t a mandatory piece of equipment but Hyundai chose to put them in anyway.

According to the defense, the air bags didn’t fail to deploy because they were defective, but rather because of the angle the car impacted the tree. The plaintiff rejected Hyundai’s claim that the car was tilted up on the driver side tires at the time of the impact and that the bag was not intended to deploy in that type of collision. Even if the bag had deployed, the defense said, it would not have prevented Gage’s head from striking the area just above the driver side door.

As a result of his injuries, plaintiff evidence showed, Gage is withdrawn, has difficulty carrying on conversations, does not recognize when he is in danger and has violent outbursts that put family members and others around him in fear. They say he will be required to expend nearly $800,000 in future rehabilitative costs and an estimate $10 million in costs living in a group home where he can receive proper care and supervision.

The defense argued that plaintiff projections of lost future earnings and future medical expenses were arbitrary numbers with no basis in fact that were “created with the biggest possible numbers for the jury.” Kirkner and Prater also suggested the prognosis for Gage’s rehabilitation is better than the plaintiff contends.

“Sometimes bad things happen and there’s no one to blame,” Prater told the jury. “We believe this is one of those times.”

A Georgia jury found Chrysler responsible for the fiery death of a 4-year old who was burned alive in Jeep Grand Cherokee involved in a 2012 accident.

The jury found that Chrysler showed “reckless or wanton disregard for human life in the design or sale” of the Grand Cherokee’s gas tank, which federal safety regulators had argued was susceptible to leaking fuel and bursting into flames when struck from behind.

According to the suit, the Grand Cherokee had stopped on a road preparing to turn left when it was stuck from behind by a pickup truck. The victim, 4-year old Remington Walden, was in his car seat in the back seat and was trapped as the SUV burst into flames. The suit said witnesses saw him struggling to escape and screaming for help. The jury awarded $120 million for the loss of life and $30 million for pain and suffering.

The family’s attorney said that Chysler had settled previous lawsuits over the gas tanks, but that the family refused to settle in this case.

“Chrysler consciously chose to put American families at risk, and gambled that juries would not figure it out,” said the attorney, Jeb Butler. “A jury in Bainbridge, Georgia, has proved them wrong.”

(Bloomberg) — Huge jury verdicts against companies over fatal flaws in their products made a comeback last year, which may foretell more bad news for carmakers with defective parts.

MINNEAPOLIS – A federal jury ruled that Toyota bore most of the responsibility in a 2006 car crash that took the lives of three people, CBS Minneapolis reported. But it also placed some blame on the driver of the vehicle, who was jailed as a result but later released.

Tuesday afternoon, the jury awarded Koua Fong Lee and the families involved in the accident $11.44 million from Toyota in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis.

Jurors decided that the company was 60 percent to blame for the wreck, but that Lee, who has long insisted he tried to slow his car before it slammed into another vehicle, was 40 percent to blame. The wreck also seriously injured two people.

Lee was driving a 1996 Camry when it slammed into another vehicle at a high speed after he exited Interstate 94 in St. Paul, Minn. He says he tried to brake, but the car wouldn’t slow; while Toyota argued there was no design defect and Lee was negligent.

A Roanoke jury has awarded $20 million to a woman who was paralyzed from the chest down when her sports car overturned in a freak accident on a country road.

The product liability verdict against Mazda Motor Corp. is believed to be the largest of its kind in Roanoke Circuit Court, at least in recent history.

Shannon Walters, 35, testified during the trial that she was forced to swerve to the left to avoid a plastic swimming pool that slipped from the bed of a pickup truck that was traveling in front of the Mazda Miata she was driving.

The largely deflated pool was airborne in the darkness at the time Walters made a split-second decision to veer off the road.

The truck did not stop, and its driver was never located after the June 2006 accident on Virginia 619 in Bedford County.

A lawsuit later asserted that Walters’ 1995 Miata

convertible was defectively designed in a way that caused the windshield to collapse after the car flipped and came to a rest on its roof.

At the time, the canvas top on the convertible was closed, and Walters was not speeding or driving recklessly in any way, according to her lawsuit.

Because of the “unreasonably dangerous” design of the car, a latch system that was supposed to hold the windshield to the convertible top failed when the car came to a rest upside down, the lawsuit alleged.

The windshield then collapsed onto Walters, leaving her with serious injuries and confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, the jury was told.

After a trial that spanned two weeks, the jury reached its decision Wednesday night. Walters’ attorneys, John Lichtenstein and Brent Brown, released the following statement on Thursday:

“This jury worked very hard and closely considered seven days of evidence. In the end, their verdict placed legal accountability on those they unanimously determined were responsible for Ms. Walter’s devastating injuries.”

A spokesman for Mazda said Thursday that the company maintains it did nothing wrong and is considering an appeal.

“Our primary defense was that there is no defect,” Eric Booth wrote in an emailed statement.