• Jury awards $29 million for brain damage
• Bus-bicycle collision results in record settlement
• Superfund settlement agreement reached

Jury awards $29 million for brain damage    (Return to index)

A New York medical-malpractice case has resulted in a $29 million award for a boy who was born brain-damaged in 1983, according to a story in the Nov. 10 New York Law Journal. The lawsuit charged New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. with failing to recognize fetal distress when Charles Frye was born at Bronx Municipal Hospital (now Jacobi Hospital). Charles, who is 15, is confined to a wheelchair and suffers from multiple disabilities, the story says. A jury in Bronx Supreme Court decided the verdict.

Bus-bicycle collision results in record settlement    (Return to index)

A Dutch student working in a University of California, San Diego, research program won a $7 million settlement last month for massive, life-threatening injuries she suffered when she was hit by a San Diego Transit bus. The young women was riding her bicycle when the bus overtook her. Her injuries have put an end to a promising modeling career and restricted her job opportunities, one of her attorneys said. Although less than her original $12 million gross-negligence claim, the final settlement is the largest in the bus service's history.

After years of legal wrangling, a class-action suit over a Georgia Superfund site resulted in a settlement agreement last summer for several hundred people who lived near an area polluted by an old chemical plant. Canadyne-Georgia Corp. offered to pay at least $10.7 million to residents of Fort Valley, who filed suit in Fulton County State Court after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found dangerous levels of heavy metals and pesticides near where Woolfolk Chemical Works had operated. The plaintiffs asked for personal-injury and other compensation as well as punitive damages from Canadyne-Georgia, which had started cleanup of the site after it bought Woolfolk in the 1980s. According to The Macon Telegraph, the site was the first in the southeastern United States to be named to the EPA's National Priorities List, also called the Superfund. See the story in the paper's Aug. 7 edition for further details.