Nuclear verdict alert: almost $50M against a mystery Texas trucking company
Key takeaways
- Nuclear verdict alert: almost $50M against a mystery Texas trucking company.
- The jury verdict came last week in Ector County, Texas, home of the oil-rich city of Odessa.
- In an email to FreightWaves, a spokeswoman for the Ammons firm, a practice led by Rob Ammons who successfully argued the case for the Mick family, said OPG had at least eight drivers at the time of the crash.
Nuclear verdict alert: almost $50M against a mystery Texas trucking company. An almost $50 million nuclear verdict in Texas is the latest in a long series. (Photo: Shutterstock) John Kingston Mon, May 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM GMT+7 3 min read A Texas county jury has handed down a $49 million judgement against a trucking company that may no longer be in business, a figure about halfway between the $10 million minimum size of a verdict considered nuclear and some larger recent cases lost by trucking interests.
The jury verdict came last week in Ector County, Texas, home of the oil-rich city of Odessa. A Texas-based carrier, OPG Logistics, was the company defendant. But the jury also found negligence on the part of the driver, Biorkys Sanchez Fernandez.
According to the summary of the crash from the Houston-based Ammons law firm that represented the family of 29-year-old Steffan Mick who was killed in the crash in January 2025, the truck driven by Fernandez “made an unsafe left turn and caused the crash.” The jury found that both OPG and Sanchez were “grossly negligent,” according to the Ammons firm.