Ashleigh Madison (left) and Bart Turner (Courtesy photos)

Savannah lawyers Ashleigh Madison and Bart Turner won a $3 million verdict in Effingham County for the family of a woman killed in a car crash.

The case includes the last of a set of claims resulting from a head-on collision that killed both parents of a 3-year-old girl, the lawyers said. The two-day trial before Effingham County State Court Judge Ronald Thompson focused only on the pain and suffering of the mother, Camie Joyner, in the moments before her death in February 2013.

Turner, of Savage, Turner, Durham, Pinckney & Savage, and Madison, of Southeast Law, represented Linda Barnes, maternal grandmother of the child and administrator of the mother's estate.

“The sole claim before the jury was the estate claim, as the wrongful death claims for Camie and her husband, the estate claim for her husband and the daughter's personal injury claim had already been settled prior to trial,” Madison said. The jury deliberated for one hour and 20 minutes.

The crash happened on Interstate 516 in Savannah. The family was heading west, on the way home from a visit to the mother's obstetrician, where they had just learned the mother was pregnant. The father was driving. The 3-year-old was in the back seat. They were hit head-on by a Ford F-250 pickup truck that crossed over the median from the eastbound lanes, according to the lawyers and both sides' summaries in the consolidated pretrial order.

The driver of the pickup truck, Trever Cannon, admitted he was “speeding slightly,” according to the defense summary in the pretrial order. A defense expert testified he was driving 58 to 63 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone. But Cannon argued the accident was the fault of an unidentified “phantom” driver, referred to as John Doe in court records. Cannon said the other car merged in front of him, requiring him to swerve into the left lane. His lawyers in their pretrial order summary called it an “evasive maneuver” and “a successful attempt to avoid a collision with the merging vehicle.”

Cannon was defended by Tracy O'Connell of Ellis, Painter, Ratterree & Adams in Savannah and Melissa Bailey of Carlock Copeland & Stair in Atlanta. They could not be reached immediately for comment.

The defense summary said Cannon lost control because the road was wet from rain that day. The defense lawyers also said the lack of a barrier in the median contributed to the tragedy.

The jury attributed 55 percent of the fault to Cannon and 45 percent to the unidentified phantom driver. The Georgia Department of Transportation was also on the verdict form, but the jury filled in a zero there.

However, Madison and Turner said the state had already settled the claims about the roadway engineering for $2.3 million before trial. Another issue raised by the defense was a claim that the ramp merging onto I-516 from Veterans Parkway was too short to allow proper acceleration.

Madison said she thought the jury was irritated by what she called the other driver's refusal to take responsibility.

“One of our themes during the course of the trial was that Trever Cannon is pointing his finger at the John Doe and the Georgia Department of Transportation,” Madison said she told the jury. “He's the one that set the ball in motion. He's the one who made these bad choices that ultimately caused the death of Camie and Stephen Joyner. If he had not have been speeding, he wouldn't have been there.”

The case is Barnes v. Cannon, No. 2017-ST-CV-174.