How Marianne Howanitz's Closing Rebuttal Secured a Verdict at Trial Over Truck Crash That Killed 2

The most effective plaintiffs’ closing rebuttals punch holes in key defense arguments while strengthening the most important, contested elements of the plaintiff’s case. At trial over a late-night truck crash that killed a mother and her child, Marianne Howanitz’s strong closing rebuttal helped secure a jury verdict against the trucker and trucking company at the heart of the case.  

Deborah E. Maldonado, 35, and her son Eliezer Maldonado, Jr., 12, were killed when their car was hit by a tractor-trailer driven by Theorphilus Clark in 2012. The Maldonados’ car had been disabled moments earlier when it was hit by another car driven by Lanessa Riobe, a non-party at trial. 

Clark’s role in the crash served as a key to the 13-day trial against him, trucking company Wayne T. Fellows, and employee leasing agency Peoplease. 

Howanitz argued Clark fatally struck the Maldonados’ car because he was so sleep deprived he failed to see tell-tale signs of problems in the roadway in time to stop. 

During closing rebuttal, Howanitz hammered Clark’s insistence that he was wide awake just before the crash. “We have a credibility issue there,” Howanitz said, as she told jurors that the only evidence that Clark was alert when the crash occurred came from the trucker himself, who testified that he downshifted through a weigh station moments before the collision. 

Howanitz noted Clark had never told police at the crash scene about the weigh station, and no documents supported his claim. “He didn’t say that to [the police officer]. He said it here,” Howanitz told jurors. “If there was evidence that he went through a weigh station, believe me you would have seen it.”

Howanitz then undercut a defense visibility study that concluded the Maldonados’ car would have been difficult to see, as she pushed back against criticism that plaintiffs had not commissioned a study of their own.. “You’re creating fantasy pictures about something that Mr. Clark admits he was never looking at,” Howanitz said as she held photos of the defense visibility study. “Mr. Clark could not say this is a fair and accurate depiction of what [he] saw because he wasn’t looking.He was rubber-necking, or he was distracted and in his highway hypnosis stage.

“Even though you get to take these boards back there,” Howanitz added, “consider the source.”

The defense’s accident reconstruction expert’s testimony was equally useless, Howanitz added, because the expert never applied trucking standards and regulations to the case. “When asked at trial about the regulations, Howanitz said said the expert merely laughed. “He said, ‘Oh… I haven’t seen those in 20 years,’” Howanitz waved her hands and chuckled, seeming to mimic the expert. 

“Why aren’t they talking about the standards that govern Mr. Clark?” Howanitz asked. “Because he violated them.”

Instead Howanitz argued the case rested on a fatigued Clark and his dangerous driving in the minutes leading up to the crash rather than the short seconds before the collision. 

"The defendants want to try their case right there,” Howanitz said as  she marked up a diagram of the roadway where the truck would have been 2.5 seconds before the crash. “two-and-a -hald seconds, couldn’t do anything.

“Of course, when you drive at 70 miles-per-hour into a situation where it’s highly unusual, [with] stopped traffic, of course it’s unavoidable [at the 2.5 second mark] because you chose to take a risk and drive through there and just hope for the best.” 

Perhaps most damning, Howanitz added, was evidence showing Clark’s speed at the time of the collision and his failure to brake immediately after the crash. “Why would anyone in the world hit a car at 70 miles per hour and not do anything, anything for 10 seconds,” Howanitz asked, “and then brake hard and stop?”

On the heels of Howanitz's rebuttal, jurors handed down a $3.9 million award and found Clark 22 percent responsible for the crash, apportioning the remaining responsibility to Riobe.