Karen E. Terry of Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart & Shipley. Courtesy photo.
West Palm Beach attorneys Karen E. Terry and Jack Hill of Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart & Shipley teamed with Port St. Lucie lawyer Roger N. Messer to land a $10 million jury verdict, but no one's jumping up and down at the result. Their clients were the parents of best friends Santia Feketa, 18, and Britney Poindexter, 17, killed in a harrowing crash with a 99-year-old driver.
Michigan tourist Walter Roney was driving the wrong way without headlights down a divided Fort Pierce highway when he struck the teens, killing them instantly. Roney died three days later.
At about 5 p.m. on Feb. 6, 2018, Roney and his 75-year-old girlfriend Carolyn Bruns left Melbourne in a 4,200-pound recreational vehicle. They were going to repair the motorhome, which was the size of a Greyhound bus and riddled with electrical problems, according to Terry.
"They had many opportunities to have this RV repaired in Michigan and every state they passed through to get to Florida, but for some reason they chose to take it to Punta Gorda to get repaired," Terry said.
The worst part, as Terry sees it, was that the couple had planned on leaving earlier but hung back to watch a NASA shuttle launch, meaning they had to drive at night. According to Terry, Roney missed his Interstate 95 exit at Fort Pierce, so looped around to go westbound. Instead he turned too early onto an eastbound lane.
"Probably because their headlights were not on, they did not see at least four signs that said, 'One way,' 'do not enter,' 'wrong way,' 'divided highway.' If they’d have seen any of those they would have known they were on the wrong side of the road," Terry said.
The Poindexters retained Terry and Feketa's family retained Messer, suing Roney's estate in April 2018. They brought separate complaints that were consolidated for trial. The crash hit the community so hard that the case had to be tried out of town in West Palm Beach.
Roger N. Messer of Messer & Messer Law. Courtesy.
"I don’t think they could have gotten a fair jury in St. Lucie County," Messer said. "The emotion here was too high."
In the run-up to trial, Terry and Messer negotiated a $1 million settlement with Bruns —Roney's passenger and the only survivor — using a rare joint enterprise theory over her alleged failures. According to Terry, Bruns was guiding Roney using Google Maps and looking after his medical needs.
"In the weeks before this trip, Roney's passenger, his girlfriend, was signing his care-taking logs and his blood pressure and his heart rate," Terry said. "So we alleged she was his caretaker, at least for purposes of this trip, that she was responsible for making intelligent decisions, i.e. not leaving at 5 o'clock, knowing it’s going to be dark and you don’t have headlights."
Roney collided head-on with Feketa's pick-up truck.
Lawyers for Roney's estate, Carlos A. Garcia, Patrick K. Dahl and Robert Paradela of Wicker Smith, O'Hara, McCoy & Ford in Fort Lauderdale, did not respond to requests for comment before deadline. Counsel to Bruns, David Kirsch of Cole, Scott & Kissane in West Palm Beach, declined comment.
The defense denied fault initially, litigated, but admitted liability at the last minute, which limited what Terry and Messer could show jurors, the attorneys said.
"The reason they did that was to keep out these damning facts of the case," Terry said. "They were very smart to do what they did."
Jurors saw two photographs of the crash and a handwritten to-do list by Roney, featuring a slew of fixes needed for the RV, including "replace headlights." Terry and Messer hired an accident reconstruction expert who confirmed that the headlights weren't on at the time of the crash, though jurors heard it from Florida Highway Patrol to avoid duplicate testimony.
Jurors didn't hear that one of Roney's children texted him about the electrical problems throughout the trip and others had taken the RV keys from him but he'd got them back. The jury knew Roney was 99 but weren't given specifics about his medical problems, which included Alzheimer's disease, cognitive and neuropathy in his hands and feet, according to Terry.
"This guy should not have been driving," Terry said.
That said, Roney had passed his Michigan driving test just months earlier, and passed an additional test for senior citizens — though not with flying colors.