Votava Obtains $750k Settlement for Street Racing Crash Victim

The Defendant Failed to Monitor the Work Vehicle of a New Employee

VNJ Partner Brett Votava’s client was struck by a vehicle involved in an illegal street race and suffered second- and third-degree road burns and broken vertebrae. Votava represented the Jackson County woman in the suit that was settled in September 2024, obtaining a $750,000 settlement.

According to the suit, the defendant did not perform due diligence to monitor a new employee who had taken a work vehicle home. That work vehicle was then involved in a street-racing collision with the plaintiff on June 19, 2021. The suit stated that the defendant did not investigate the new employee before letting him use the work vehicle, and if it had, would have seen that the employee was actively involved in street racing, based on social media posts.

The plaintiff was in the passenger seat and her husband was driving when two vehicles involved in the street race collided with the plaintiff, causing their vehicle to skid off the road. Just after the crash, the new employee, driving the defendant’s work truck, arrived at the scene. The suit stated that the employee told witnesses that the driver was his friend, and he needed to leave before law enforcement arrived. The new employee then used the work truck to push the street racing vehicle six miles along the highway and local streets to a house.

Votava argued that the work vehicle was equipped with GPS tracking that could be monitored remotely or in real time, but no one ever monitored the new employee prior to the incident. Despite not having work calls to make, the new employee drove the company vehicle 22 times without authorization and exceeded the speed limit 255 times between Monday and Saturday of his on-call shift.

Read the original news story from Missouri Lawyers Media.