A $65 Million Colorado Trucking Verdict Runs Into a $598,350 Cap

A Larimer County jury returned a unanimous $65 million Colorado trucking verdict on 21 September 2026, after a five-day trial, against truck driver Darnell Yingling and his employer, the Fort Collins carrier Import Towing and Recovery, over the bridge strike that killed 32-year-old Megan Arneson on Interstate 25 in August 2022. What happens next is the part no one has written down: Colorado caps noneconomic damages in both of the claims tried, the driver's felony conviction does not lift the wrongful death cap, and the reason the number can still survive largely intact is that economic loss and physical impairment are not capped at all.

That distinction is the whole case for anyone reading this as a practitioner rather than as a news item. A $65 million Colorado trucking verdict is not $65 million in the way a Texas or Georgia verdict of the same size would be, and it is not reduced to a few hundred thousand dollars either. It lands somewhere determined by how the jury filled out the verdict form — and by which generation of Colorado's damages caps governs a claim that accrued in 2022.

How much did the jury award in the Colorado I-25 bridge-strike case?

The jury awarded $65,000,000, unanimously, after a trial that lasted five days. Counsel for the Arneson family, Kari Jones Dulin of Dulin McQuinn Young, describes the award as the largest jury verdict ever returned in Larimer County and the largest trucking-crash verdict ever returned in Colorado; both characterizations come from the plaintiffs' side rather than from any court-maintained tally, and should be read that way. The firm also says the money was secured on behalf of Arneson's son, who was ten at the time of the crash.

The verdict was returned on 21 September 2026 and reported the following day. No breakdown of the award between economic loss, noneconomic loss, physical impairment and exemplary damages has been made public, and that breakdown is the single most consequential document in the case. Everything below turns on it.

Why did the excavator hit the Weld County Road 34 overpass?

At about 6 p.m. on 8 August 2022, Megan Arneson was driving north on I-25 near Mead with her ten-year-old son in the car, returning from a water park. Yingling, hauling a large excavator on a trailer for Import Towing and Recovery, moved to pass. The Colorado State Patrol's investigation concluded that the excavator had been loaded improperly, leaving its arm extended above the clearance of the Weld County Road 34 overpass. The arm struck the bridge. Concrete and debris came down onto the northbound lanes, and a large piece went through the windshield of Arneson's SUV. She was killed. Her son suffered comparatively minor physical injuries and survived.

The 2022 complaint, filed by Arneson's parents — now the child's guardians — alleged that Yingling and the carrier recklessly and negligently failed to secure the excavator for transport, that no one confirmed the arm had been lowered and secured, and that Yingling drove under the overpass without confirming he could clear it with the load he was carrying. Those are load-securement and pre-trip-inspection allegations, not speed or impairment allegations, which is why the federal rulebook matters more here than it does in an ordinary highway case.

Which federal rules govern securing an excavator on a trailer?

Two provisions of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations do most of the work. Under 49 C.F.R. § 392.9, a driver may not operate a commercial motor vehicle unless the cargo is properly distributed and adequately secured as specified in §§ 393.100 through 393.136, and the driver must inspect the cargo and securement devices before driving and at intervals thereafter. Under 49 C.F.R. § 393.130, which applies specifically to heavy vehicles, equipment and machinery operating on wheels or tracks and weighing 10,000 pounds or more, accessory equipment such as booms, arms, buckets and blades must be lowered and secured, and the machine itself must be restrained against movement with a minimum number of tiedowns scaled to its length.

Colorado law supplies the other half. C.R.S. § 42-4-504 sets a statutory maximum vehicle height of fourteen feet six inches, laden or unladen, but expressly provides that the statutory limit yields where an overhead structure permits less vertical clearance. A load that is legal on open highway is therefore not legal under a lower bridge, and the burden of knowing the difference sits with the driver and the carrier that dispatched him. That is the doctrinal seam a bridge-strike case is tried in, and it is why carrier-side liability in these cases is rarely confined to respondeat superior: negligent entrustment, negligent hiring and negligent training are all live where the securement decision was made in the yard rather than on the road.

Who was found liable, and on what theories?

The named defendants were Yingling and Import Towing and Recovery, operated as Import Auto Inc. of Fort Collins. The claim against the driver is straightforward negligence in loading, inspecting and routing an oversize load. The claim against the carrier is the one that carries the damages, because a carrier is answerable both for its driver's conduct in the course of employment and for its own choices about whom it puts behind the wheel and how it supervises them.

One fact reported by the Fort Collins Coloradoan does more work than any other on that second theory: Yingling is reported to have received his unrestricted commercial driver's license four days before the crash. That detail, if it was in evidence, converts an ordinary securement case into a direct-negligence case about the carrier's own judgment — a four-day-old CDL holder dispatched with a tracked excavator on a trailer under a low overpass. It is also the kind of fact that drives exemplary damages, and Colorado permits them where the injury is attended by circumstances of fraud, malice or willful and wanton conduct.

What happened to the truck driver in the criminal case?

Yingling, then 53, was charged in February 2023 and pleaded guilty on 3 November 2023 to vehicular homicide — reckless driving, a Class 4 felony. The remaining counts, which included criminally negligent homicide, child abuse and reckless driving, were dismissed under the plea agreement. On 5 January 2024 he was sentenced to four years in community corrections, a felony sentencing alternative to prison, followed by 300 hours of public service.

That conviction matters civilly for one reason, and it is not the reason most readers assume.

Does Colorado's wrongful death damages cap limit the $65 million verdict?

Yes, in part: C.R.S. § 13-21-203 caps noneconomic loss in a wrongful death action, and C.R.S. § 13-21-102.5 caps noneconomic loss in the surviving child's own personal injury claim, but neither statute limits economic damages, and § 13-21-102.5(5) provides that nothing in the section limits recovery of compensatory damages for physical impairment or disfigurement.

Two separate claims were in play. The wrongful death claim compensates the statutory beneficiary for grief, loss of companionship, impairment of quality of life, inconvenience, pain and suffering and emotional stress — all noneconomic, all capped — plus the decedent's net pecuniary loss, which is not. The child's own claim, as an occupant injured in the same collision, is an ordinary personal injury action with its own separate cap and its own uncapped categories.

Which generation of caps applies is decided by when the claim arose, and this claim arose in August 2022 and was filed the following month. The pre-HB24-1472 figures therefore govern. HB24-1472, signed on 3 June 2024, raised the caps substantially, but it did so for the cases that came after.

Cap	Claims accruing 1 Jan 2022 – 31 Dec 2023	Post-HB24-1472 (from 1 Jan 2025)
Wrongful death, noneconomic loss (§ 13-21-203)	$598,350	$2,125,000
Personal injury, noneconomic loss (§ 13-21-102.5)	$642,180	$1,500,000
Personal injury, noneconomic, on clear and convincing evidence	$1,284,370	doubling provision removed
Economic damages	no cap	no cap
Physical impairment or disfigurement (§ 13-21-102.5(5))	no cap	no cap
Exemplary damages (§ 13-21-102)	limited to the amount of actual damages, trebled only for post-filing willful and wanton conduct	unchanged
Next inflation adjustment	—	1 January 2028, and every two years thereafter

The practical consequence is that the reduction hearing in this case is an accounting exercise over the verdict form, not a haircut applied to the headline. Noneconomic line items come down to $598,350 and $642,180 respectively. Economic loss — the financial support and household services a 32-year-old mother would have provided a child through adulthood, plus the child's own future care — passes through untouched. So does anything the jury placed in the physical impairment column. An award weighted toward those categories loses very little of $65 million; an award weighted toward grief and loss of companionship loses most of it.

What is the felonious killing exception, and does a vehicular homicide plea trigger it?

Colorado's wrongful death cap has an exception: § 13-21-203(1)(a) lifts the limit where the death was caused by a felonious killing, and § 15-11-803(1)(b) defines that term as a killing for which the actor is convicted of, pleads guilty to, or pleads nolo contendere to murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, or manslaughter. Vehicular homicide is not on that list. A plea to vehicular homicide — reckless driving therefore does not, on its own terms, engage the exception, however serious the underlying conduct.

The exception is not entirely foreclosed by the absence of a matching conviction — Colorado courts may find the elements of a felonious killing established by a preponderance of the evidence in the civil case, and the Colorado Court of Appeals held in 2025 that the exception reaches corporate defendants as well as individuals. But the elements still have to be the elements of murder or manslaughter. On a load-securement and pre-trip-inspection record, that is a demanding route, and nothing in the reported account of this trial suggests it was taken.

This is the point competitors covering the verdict have uniformly missed. A felony conviction arising from a fatal crash sounds like it should uncap the damages, and in Colorado it does not unless the felony is one of three specific homicides.

Is $65 million the largest trucking verdict in Colorado?

Plaintiffs' counsel says it is, and also that it is the largest jury verdict of any kind ever returned in Larimer County; neither claim is drawn from an official register, and Colorado does not maintain one, so the accurate formulation is that it is the largest reported Colorado trucking-crash verdict known to the firm that tried it. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. Colorado's caps kept headline numbers artificially low for a generation, and HB24-1472 has now roughly tripled the wrongful death ceiling and more than doubled the personal injury ceiling for claims that arise going forward. Verdicts in this range will read differently after 2025 because more of the number will survive.

Timeline

Date	Event
8 August 2022	Excavator arm strikes the Weld County Road 34 overpass on northbound I-25 near Mead; Megan Arneson, 32, is killed; her ten-year-old son survives
7 September 2022	Wrongful death action filed by Arneson's parents, the child's guardians, against Yingling and Import Towing and Recovery
February 2023	Criminal charges filed against Yingling, including vehicular homicide
3 November 2023	Yingling pleads guilty to vehicular homicide — reckless driving, a Class 4 felony; remaining counts dismissed
5 January 2024	Yingling sentenced to four years in community corrections plus 300 hours of public service
3 June 2024	HB24-1472 signed, raising Colorado's damages caps for cases arriving after 1 January 2025
c. 15–21 September 2026	Five-day civil trial in Larimer County District Court
21 September 2026	Unanimous $65,000,000 verdict returned

What it means for motor carriers, insurers and the plaintiffs' bar

For motor carriers, the exposure in this case was created in the yard and not on the highway. The securement of a tracked excavator, the lowering of its arm, the pre-trip inspection required by 49 C.F.R. § 392.9 and the routing of an over-height load under a known low structure are all administrative decisions made before the truck moves, each of them documented or conspicuously undocumented. A carrier that cannot produce a securement record, a route check against posted clearances and a training file for the driver it dispatched is litigating the direct-negligence claim, not just the vicarious one, and the direct-negligence claim is where willful and wanton conduct findings come from.

For excess and umbrella insurers, the reserving question in Colorado is not the verdict number but the verdict form. A capped-state verdict cannot be reserved from the headline, because the post-trial reduction depends entirely on how damages were allocated among categories the legislature treated very differently. The same $65 million reduces to radically different judgments depending on the split between economic loss, physical impairment and grief. Carriers writing Colorado risk on claims arising after 1 January 2025 should also be modeling the new ceilings: $2,125,000 and $1,500,000 in place of $598,350 and $642,180, with the first inflation adjustment due 1 January 2028.

For the plaintiffs' bar, the case is a reminder that damages architecture in a capped state is trial strategy rather than post-trial cleanup. Economic loss has to be proved with the same care as liability, because it is the part of the award that survives; physical impairment has to be pleaded, proved and placed in its own line on the verdict form, because § 13-21-102.5(5) protects it only if the jury is asked about it separately. Where a minor plaintiff has his own claim arising from the same collision, that claim carries its own uncapped categories and should not be folded into the wrongful death case for convenience. And where a defendant's conduct supports exemplary damages, the ceiling is set by the amount of actual damages awarded, which is one more reason the compensatory categories do the heavy lifting. The contingency fee, the structure of any settlement of the minor's claim and the guardianship approval that follows all sit downstream of the same arithmetic.

For the defense bar, the reduction motion is the case after verdict. The categories on the verdict form, the accrual date that fixes which cap generation applies, and the absence of a qualifying homicide conviction under § 15-11-803(1)(b) are the three levers, and all three are available here.

Frequently asked questions

How much was the Colorado I-25 bridge-strike verdict?

$65,000,000, returned unanimously by a Larimer County District Court jury on 21 September 2026 after a five-day trial.

Who has to pay the $65 million verdict?

Truck driver Darnell Yingling and his employer, Import Towing and Recovery (Import Auto Inc.) of Fort Collins, subject to the statutory reductions applied after trial.

Does Colorado cap wrongful death damages?

Colorado caps noneconomic damages only. For a claim accruing in 2022, the wrongful death noneconomic cap is $598,350; economic damages and damages for physical impairment or disfigurement are not capped at all.

Will the $65 million be reduced?

The noneconomic components will be reduced to the statutory figures; the economic-loss and physical-impairment components will not. Without a public verdict form, how much of the $65 million survives cannot be calculated from outside the case.

Does the driver's felony conviction remove the damages cap?

No. The felonious killing exception in C.R.S. § 13-21-203(1)(a) is limited to killings amounting to first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter under C.R.S. § 15-11-803(1)(b), and vehicular homicide is not among them.

What are Colorado's damages caps now?

For cases arriving after 1 January 2025, HB24-1472 sets $2,125,000 for noneconomic loss in wrongful death and $1,500,000 for noneconomic loss in personal injury, with the next inflation adjustment on 1 January 2028.

What rules govern hauling an excavator?

49 C.F.R. § 393.130 requires booms, arms and other accessory equipment to be lowered and secured and the machine restrained against movement; 49 C.F.R. § 392.9 bars a driver from operating until the cargo is adequately secured and inspected.