The 2022 crash that killed a man and his young son near an Interstate 64 on-ramp just south of Charlottesville has already resulted in a $1.1 million court-approved settlement against the red light-running box truck driver and his father’s trucking company.
Now, the bereaved widow and mother is filing a pair of lawsuits seeking another $10 million from the state agency and private companies that designed and constructed the intersection where John Chadduck ran a red light and killed 34-year-old Bryan Warrick and his 5-year-old son Milo.
“The timing of the traffic signal sequences at the U.S. Route 29 and Interstate 64 interchange was negligently designed,” according to Jacqueline Warrick’s lawsuits.
Her suits claim that the “all red” period, the time when red lights should communicate that traffic in all directions must stop, provided too short a buffer to protect the vehicle her husband was driving across U.S. 29 when he was broadsided.
“Had the traffic signal sequence been properly designed, developed, implemented and/or monitored,” the lawsuits claim, then the Chadduck’s truck “would have cleared the intersection before the protected green left turn arrow illuminated allowing Bryan to proceed into the intersection safely.”
One of the lawsuits names five private firms involved in the intersection’s construction, while the other suit targets the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Suing VDOT is an uphill battle, according to Charlottesville-based legal expert David Heilberg. Splitting the litigation makes more sense, he told The Daily Progress.
“VDOT will claim a defense of sovereign immunity,” said Heilberg. “You can’t sue the king.”
Judges routinely throw out lawsuits against state agencies, said Heilberg, so plaintiffs have to find unusual workarounds.
“They might have to show gross negligence or reckless disregard for human life to prevail in that lawsuit,” he said.
By contrast, Heilberg said, winning a case against private companies typically requires only showing simple negligence.
Records filed in Fluvanna County Circuit Court, where the victims lived, show no resistance to the $1.1 million insurance settlement approved earlier this year.
“The parties and beneficiaries agree that this compromise settlement is a fair and reasonable settlement under the facts and circumstances of this case,” according to the agreement approved March 8 by Judge David Barredo.
The Fluvanna settlement discharged liability from driver John Chadduck, his father James Chadduck and Windfall Inc., the Culpeper-based intrastate freight carrier the elder Chadduck operates. Additional parties discharged from liability include publicly held Japanese freight forwarding firm Kintetsu World Express Inc. and Dulles-based freight firm CDS Air Freight Inc.
The settlement was funded by $1 million from a Progressive insurance policy held by Windfall and by $100,000 from USAA, under a policy that Bryan Warrick held in case of uninsured or underinsured motorists.
The lawyers who negotiated the settlement cited costs of $50,000 and additionally took a fee of $275,000, according to the agreement.
The Fluvanna civil action was resolved seven months after John Chadduck was convicted in Albemarle County General District Court of reckless driving and given a three-month jail term for the May 19, 2022 crash.
“He just plowed right through,” said Robert Downer, the judge hearing that case. “It was a reckless decision.”
In addition to attacks on John Chadduck’s driving, the criminal case also included criticism of the intersection, which was completed about seven months before the fatal crash.
According to Heilberg, trying to show mistakes by companies creating an intersection could be legally daunting.
“Unless they violated some kind of standard of care or standard of design, that’s a tough lawsuit to win,” Heilberg said.
Bryan Slaughter, the lawyer filing the suits, declined to share his litigation strategy or otherwise discuss the lawsuits with The Daily Progress. One facet of his Albemarle Circuit Court filing does, however, appear clear in the court file: He has not yet served the lawsuits on any of the six defendants.
Heilberg said the timing of the suits, filed in early May, less than two weeks before the two-year anniversary of the fatal crash, seems designed to ensure that they meet Virginia’s two-year deadline for filing claims. He said that the fact that the suits have not yet been served suggests that some private fact-finding or negotiation might be ongoing.
If the new intersection were officially deemed dangerous, it would be an irony, because the intersection, according to a VDOT representative, was designed to reduce crashes that had been occurring on I-64. The previous way to get on eastbound I-64 was a loop ramp that created what the representative described as a “weave,” a dangerous interplay when two ramps — one an entrance and one an exit — lie in close proximity to each other.
The five private firms sued include four subcontractors, Jo Herbert Company, Clark Nexsen Inc., CES Consulting and Wallace Montgomery & Associates, as well as lead contractor, West Point-based Curtis Contracting, which holds a $28.5 million contract for six Charlottesville-area intersection projects, including the recently completed roundabout linking Hydraulic Road and Hillsdale Drive north of the city.
The litigation comes at a fraught time for Curtis Contracting, as it was a Curtis employee using a company-assigned truck who attempted last year to kidnap a University of Virginia student. The young woman survived, and the perpetrator, 41-year-old James Robert Allen, pleaded guilty and was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison.
The lawsuits also come at a fraught time for the profession of traffic engineering. A spike in the fatality rate on American roads after 2020 has fueled widespread attacks on the field, including recent books with such titles as “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer” by Chuck Marohn and “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” by Wes Marshall.
“This could be a national case,” University of Virginia historian Peter Norton told The Daily Progress. “I do think it is a kind of malpractice to be designing every environment around the assumption that everybody has to drive everywhere and drive there fast.”
By his own admission to an investigating officer, John Chadduck was traveling north between 58 and 60 mph, just above the 55 mph speed limit, when he saw the light turn yellow.
“It’s always problematic to mix traffic lights with wherever people are driving fast,” Norton said. “If you mix the traffic engineering that we expect on a street, like a stoplight, with the sort of highway-like design that we have on 29, that’s a problematic combination.”
Norton contends that the straightness and wideness of U.S. 29 sends motorists a speed-stoking message.
“Anytime a driver sees a divided road with a median strip and a generous shoulder and straight parallel lanes, the road is telling them something that the speed limit signs can’t really contradict,” he said.
While an empty Ford F-750 can weigh as little as 10,000 pounds, John Chadduck’s box truck slammed into the Warricks loaded and weighing 26,000 pounds, according to the lawsuit. Both Bryan and Milo Warrick died at the scene, according to reports.
“The thing we have normalized is that every day well over 100 people in the U.S. are killed in on roads and streets,” said Norton. “This is not normal.”
Norton, whose own recent books chronicle America’s reliance on cars, said he bears less scorn for specific traffic engineers than for the demands placed upon the profession, particularly the demand to move lots of vehicles.
“I think that the people designing these things face contradictory imperatives and they try to find the contradiction that is most tolerable,” said Norton. “But any contradiction in traffic engineering means somebody’s going to die.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com