CAT company ordered to pay $25 mil. judgment

Bill Gang

Friday, March 12, 1999 | 11:18 a.m.

A jury has awarded $25 million to a man who became paralyzed below the waist after a CAT bus ramp raised prematurely as he was boarding, knocking his wheelchair out from under him.

The judgment against ATC VanCom Inc., the company that runs the Citizen Area Transit buses, is believed to be the largest in Nevada history.

The jury in Chief District Judge Lee Gates' courtroom deliberated less than two hours Thursday after a three-day trial before handing down the verdict in favor of 40-year-old Lee O'Brien.

O'Brien, already using a wheelchair because of a 1982 motorcycle accident, had been using an automatic ramp to board a CAT bus in 1993 when the driver prematurely raised the device, according to attorney Randy Mainor.

O'Brien said the movement knocked his wheelchair out from under him and sent his head and neck slamming against the metal ramp.

There was no question in the trial about whether O'Brien knew how to board the bus using the device.

In fact the jury heard that after O'Brien graduated from Sagamon State University in Springfield, Ill., his first job was teaching wheelchair-bound people how to get on and off buses.

Before the CAT bus accident, Mainor said, O'Brien had had sensation in his legs. After the accident, he said, O'Brien became completely paralyzed below the waist. Sensation was replaced with chronic pain that requires him to take methadone, the attorney said.

ATC VanCom Inc. and ATC Vancom of Nevada Inc. had accepted responsibility for O'Brien's injuries but offered only $175,000 in compensation.

Mainor said the company's position was that O'Brien's debilitating injuries were, in large part, a degeneration of his earlier handicap.

At trial, O'Brien recalled the bus driver telling him as he lay sprawled on the ground, "You can't be hurt, you're already a paraplegic."

Mainor said, however, that the jury understood that people who are handicapped can indeed be hurt. The attorney had asked the jury to return a judgment of $14 million.

O'Brien said he is "shocked and dumbfounded" by the amount of the verdict and he lamented outside the courthouse that he didn't thank the jury the way he would have liked.

Mainor lamented that it took more than five years to get to trial and that it could be years longer before the case is ultimately decided if appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court.

But for now O'Brien is savoring his victory.

"I needed a good day after what I have gone through for the last five years," he said.

Yet he noted the judgment doesn't ease the pain.

"You know, my neck still hurts and my back still hurts," he said. "The money doesn't change a physical thing."

Mainor had described O'Brien as a "fiercely independent and self-sufficient" man who now suffers a variety of medical ills because of the additional damage the CAT bus incident caused to his already frail body.