Jury awards $81M in 2018 Pleasant Grove auto-pedestrian collision

SALT LAKE CITY — It was a tragic and deadly collision that unfolded just a week before Christmas.

According to police, in Pleasant Grove on Dec. 17, 2018, 12-year-old Michael Madsen was crossing Pleasant Grove Boulevard in a crosswalk at State Street when he was hit and fatally injured by a truck driver who was turning right.

Now, more than seven years later and more than six years after his parents first filed a lawsuit, the case has resulted in a massive, $81 million jury verdict against the driver and his employer, including $15 million total to the boy's two friends who witnessed the crash.

"It kind of begins to heal the pains that you deal with in a situation like this," said Michael's father, Russ Madsen, during an interview Tuesday with KSL. "Losing your faith in people and in justice — that in a big way, at least for me, was restored, and that helped me out quite a bit."

Michael Madsen

According to the boy's mom, Mandy Madsen, Michael was creative and ambitious beyond his years.

"He was incredibly brilliant; he was, in fact, a creative genius," the mother said. "He was already planning a book series and wanted to make it into movies."

She compared her son to Stan Lee, cocreator of Marvel Comics.

"I felt like Michael was going to be that," Mandy Madsen said. "Michael was just a brilliant, sweet, amazing son, and we are just so proud of him and who he was."

The mother said Michael was also a good brother to his siblings and was well-liked by his classmates at school.

"We had a book given to us from the school where kids wrote down memories," she said. "I learned a lot about how other kids saw him. They said he was always smiling. He could make the whole class laugh. His art would light up the room. Some kids said, 'I was lonely, and he invited me to play basketball,' or 'he protected me from bullies,' or 'he was one of the nicest people I ever met.'"

Dec. 17, 2018

Michael's family and attorneys said the boy was walking home with his two friends along Pleasant Grove Boulevard about 6 p.m. on Dec. 17, 2018, when the light turned green, the walk light turned on, and Michael entered the crosswalk.

Surveillance footage from the area captured a large commercial truck striking him as it turned right.

"The way he was walking, the truck came from behind him, so he didn't even see that he was going to be hit," Mandy Madsen said.

While Pleasant Grove police in news reports at the time called the collision a "tragic accident," his family maintained it was something beyond that.

"There were a lot of factors that showed that it was completely avoidable," Russ Madsen said. "It was something where had they taken the right precautions and been safe and really recognized this driver for who and what he was, things just would have been a lot different."

Lawsuit

In a complaint dated Oct. 10, 2019, lawyers representing the family and Michael's friends alleged multiple forms of negligence against the driver and his employer, identified in the documents as Rusty Cade Cope and Beacon Roofing Supply, which they said was doing business in Utah as Allied Building Products Corp.

Among the causes of action named in the complaint was "negligent infliction of emotional distress," which attorneys said affected Michael's two friends who were feet away from the collision and witnessed it.

"Someone's negligence caused them to suffer extreme or severe emotional distress, which is entirely understandable here," explained one of the plaintiff attorneys, Blake Johnson, of Johnson Livingston. "In order to make that claim, they have to be close enough to the threat of harm that they're inside what's called the 'zone of danger.'"

Lawyers painted the driver as "careless, reckless and incompetent" with a bad driving record, and said his employer knew it.

Attorneys said during their own investigation they uncovered Cope's driving record.

Those documents, which they shared with KSL, showed citations in multiple states for speeding, excess speed and reckless driving. The record also showed a license suspension in 2012 for "failure to pay fines."

"There was a laundry list of problems with this driver, and then we come to find out the company knew about all of this," Johnson said. "They were well aware of his driving record. They were well aware of problems they had with him during his employment, and it just seemed they were turning a blind eye at every turn."

Attorneys said prior to the trial, the court ruled that the driver was negligent in causing the crash.

They said the case then moved forward against Allied Building Products, which they clarified was sued as Beacon Roofing Supply after an acquisition. Lawyers said the company had since been sold.

Verdict

In the trial, the Provo jury ultimately came back with an $81 million verdict in favor of the families, including $7.5 million to each of Michael's friends who witnessed the crash.

Attorneys believed the total amount was a record for a jury trial verdict in Utah.

"You see the verdict, but the reality of this is Mandy and Russ lost their son, and they have to live with that," said Sean Claggett, another of the plaintiff attorneys who is with the law firm Claggett & Sykes Trial Lawyers. "That's every day, and the jury valued that in a manner that was righteous."

Claggett said an agreement was in place at the time of the verdict, and the ruling will not be appealed.

"The verdict was great, and it certainly sets a precedent in Utah, and I think you'll see that people that are hurt or killed in Utah are going to have a much better opportunity to have justice done moving forward," Claggett said. "I'm very proud of this."

Johnson said multiple other companies including insurance firms monitored and attended the proceedings to see what the outcome would be, and he hoped there would be an impact on safety and the way business is conducted in the future.

"The hopeful result is not just this company but other companies in the same position are going to say, 'You know what, we don't want to find ourselves in that position, so when we see a problem, when there is somebody that is an obvious danger, we're going to keep them off the roads — we're going to make better decisions,'" Johnson said. "It all boils down to corporate responsibility on this."

Related topics