Newport Beach-based personal injury firm Sweet James has secured a record $17.4 million jury verdict from the City of Hanford in Kings County, California on behalf of octogenarian sisters who were injured in a car accident.

Judge Valerie Chrissakis of the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Kings granted $9.6 million to Gayle Dutton, 89, and $7.8 million to Barbara Musick, 81, on Oct. 1 after a jury trial beginning on Aug. 19.

Sweet James said in a news release that the amount is the largest verdict ever awarded in the county's history. Dutton and Musick were represented by Sweet James attorneys Bobby Taghavi and Ashkahn Mohamadi.

Mohamadi said in an interview that the jury was particularly moved by stories about the elderly plaintiffs' unconventional lives.

"The most important thing when you are trying a case is your client," he said. "And in this case, our clients, Gayle and Barbara, were two of the most amazing women you've ever met in your entire life." At their age, he said, they were unusually active and regularly practiced activities like gardening, woodworking, housepainting and driving a tractor on ten acres of land.

"You're talking about two women who were functioning on a level that was higher than probably most people in their thirties," he said. "Our argument to the jury was ... they were given a gift, a gift of being very physically fit and active and healthy ... And then in a single moment, because someone wasn't paying attention when they were driving a Ford F450 ... and blew through a stop sign at 51 miles an hour, [it] changed the course of the rest of their lives."

The plaintiffs filed the original complaint alleging negligence against Damian Rolando Espinoza and Colton Chance Banuelos, who were involved in the collision, and the City of Hanford on May 18, 2023. Attorneys from Griswold, LaSalle, Cobb, Dowd & Gin, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, provided counsel for the defendants. Mohamadi said in an interview that Musick and Dutton initially sought just shy of a total of $12 million in damages in pretrial litigation and the City of Hanford offered to pay $7.65 million before the case went to trial.

According to the claim, Espinoza drove his Ford F450 truck with an attached trailer, which was owned by the City of Hanford, head-on into a Ford Ranger operated by Musick at an intersection on Feb. 6, 2023. Espinoza had failed to stop at a stop sign after Banuelos, who was sitting in the truck's passenger seat, had encouraged him to drive erratically, it said.

As a result of their injuries, both Musick and her passenger, Dutton, were hospitalized for over a week. Mohamedi said the "biggest pivotal moment" in the trial was the testimony of their orthopedic surgeon, who confirmed that the women had suffered extensive orthopedic and brain injuries. Gayle, he said, almost died from hers.

"Gayle Dutton and Barbara Musick were in the last chapter of their lives," he said. "And so one of the biggest pushbacks we got from the city in this case were that these ladies were elderly, and that they really didn't have that much longer to live, statistically."

Mohamadi said that Sweet James was able to obtain access to game-changing surveillance camera footage of the crash from a home on the corner of the intersection where the accident occurred. The City of Hanford only admitted liability once the plaintiffs' counsel produced the video in discovery, he said.

He added that he hopes the amount awarded in this verdict will set a precedent that benefits personal injury plaintiffs in venues outside Los Angeles County.

"There was a ... mentality that there would not be a big verdict in [Hanford] because there had really never been a big verdict in [Kings County]," he said. "The biggest verdict that I'm aware of in a personal injury case was in 2010 for $6.45 million ... I hope the lasting impact this verdict will have is it'll allow other people that are in similar situations to get justice for their cases and not have to take a discount because the insurance companies say, 'Well, hey, the people in this county don't historically pay that much.'"