Richmond, Indiana Fire Class Action Verdict: City 40% Liable for 2023 Plastics Blaze, Weighs Appeal

The Richmond, Indiana fire class action verdict returned on Friday 18 September 2026 found the City of Richmond, Cornerstone Trading Group, LLC and Cornerstone's owner, Seth Smith, negligent and liable in nuisance for the April 2023 plastics fire on NW F Street, with the jury placing 40% of the fault on the city and 30% on each of the private defendants. The eight-member jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana awarded the two class representatives modest individual sums, but the finding that matters is class-wide liability for a class of roughly 2,000 evacuees, and on Monday 21 September the mayor's office told the Richmond Common Council the city is weighing an appeal.

The case is Craig v. Cornerstone Trading Group, LLC, No. 1:23-cv-01575-TWP-MJD, before Judge Tanya Walton Pratt. It is one of the few industrial-disaster class actions of the past decade to reach a jury rather than settle, and it did so against a municipal defendant whose exposure is shaped by the Indiana Tort Claims Act. Liability is now fixed; the size of the bill, who pays it, and whether any of it reaches class members before an appeal runs its course are all still open.

What did the jury decide in the Richmond, Indiana fire class action?

The jury found all three trial defendants negligent and found that each had created a nuisance. That answers the common questions the court certified for class treatment: whether the defendants owed and breached a duty of care in how the NW F Street properties were kept, and whether the condition of those properties unreasonably interfered with the neighbors' use and enjoyment of their homes. The trial began on 14 September 2026 and ran five days in the Indianapolis courthouse.

The class representatives are Tushawn Craig and Marquetta Stokes, who filed suit in 2023 on behalf of people ordered out of the half-mile evacuation zone. Their second amended complaint pleaded strict liability for ultra-hazardous activity, negligence, res ipsa loquitur, private nuisance and trespass, alleging that the defendants' failure to maintain the site "set in motion a chain of events" that released noxious fumes and hazardous materials, including asbestos, into the air and ground water. By trial, the claims that went to the jury were negligence and nuisance.

"This verdict is about accountability for the more than 2,000 people whose lives were disrupted by this fire," lead plaintiffs' counsel John A. Smalley said after the verdict, as reported by WISH-TV.

How much fault did the jury assign to the City of Richmond?

Forty percent. The jury split responsibility 40% to the City of Richmond, 30% to Cornerstone Trading Group and 30% to Smith personally. The same ratio carried through to the nuisance award, which the jury divided $4,000 against the city and $3,000 against each private defendant.

Defendant	Role	Fault share	Nuisance damages allocated (class reps)
City of Richmond	Owned two of the three NW F Street parcels, including the one where the fire started; issued unsafe-building orders from 2019	40%	$4,000
Cornerstone Trading Group, LLC	Stored the plastics awaiting recycling	30%	$3,000
Seth Smith	Owner of Cornerstone	30%	$3,000
Total		100%	$10,000

For a Richmond fire lawsuit that the city spent three years framing as the fault of a negligent private operator, a 40% share is a substantial rejection of that theory. The city's own records gave the jury the material: after a 2019 inspection, Richmond's Unsafe Building Commission ordered the buildings repaired, demolished or vacated, and described them as unsafe to people and property, a fire hazard, a hazard to public health and a nuisance. The city then acquired two parcels through tax-sale proceedings in 2021, after the owner stopped paying property taxes, and began its own cleanup, but the plastics were still there on 11 April 2023.

How much money did the Richmond fire plaintiffs get?

Very little, individually. Craig and Stokes were each awarded $5,000 on their negligence claims, and the jury awarded $10,000 in nuisance damages allocated across the three defendants. Those are the class representatives' own claims, tried as exemplars; they are not the class recovery.

The damages number that matters has not been set. With 3,594 people notified that they may be class members, even modest per-person sums add up. At the representatives' $5,000 negligence figure, for example, 2,000 claimants would total $10 million before nuisance damages; that is arithmetic, not a finding, and the court has not said how class damages will be calculated or whether the representatives' awards will serve as any kind of benchmark.

One pretrial ruling narrows what the class can recover from the city. In a 27 March 2026 summary-judgment order, Judge Pratt dismissed several counts against the city with prejudice and granted the city summary judgment on personal-injury damages that would require expert testimony, while leaving the negligence count for trial. The practical effect is that the class's claims against Richmond are weighted toward displacement, property and nuisance-type losses rather than medical causation, which keeps the damages phase closer to a claims-administration exercise than a sequence of individual toxic-exposure trials.

Who is in the Richmond fire class action?

Judge Pratt certified the class on 29 September 2025 and divided it into two subclasses:

• owners of property within the half-mile evacuation zone; and
• non-owners residing in the evacuation area, such as renters and other displaced residents.

The order treated the negligence question as common to the more than 2,000 potential individual cases, which is what made a single liability trial possible. The City of Richmond and My-Way Trading later moved to decertify the class and for reconsideration of the summary-judgment order; the case nonetheless went to trial as a certified class, and the verdict now binds the class on liability.

The evacuation itself defines the class geography. The Wayne County Emergency Management Agency ordered everyone within a half-mile radius of 358 NW F Street to leave on the afternoon of 11 April 2023, affecting close to 2,000 people. The fire burned for days and the order was lifted at 4:00 p.m. on 16 April 2023 after a review of EPA testing data. Debris carried from the site later tested positive for asbestos, which became a central allegation in the complaint.

How did the city end up sharing the blame?

The answer lies in property records rather than fire science. The Indiana State Fire Marshal's investigation, conducted with the Richmond Fire Department and ATF, ruled the cause of the fire undetermined: the site burned for about a week and was flushed with water, destroying evidence. But the same investigation placed the origin at or near a semi-trailer on the 358 NW F Street parcel, and the city owned two of the three parcels where the material was stored, including the one where the fire began.

That ownership, combined with years of documented knowledge through the unsafe-building process, gave the plaintiffs a premises theory against the city that did not depend on proving what ignited the plastics. The city's position has been that Cornerstone and Smith ignored cleanup orders and that the plastics were theirs. The jury accepted that the private defendants carried most of the fault, 60% combined, but not that the city's ownership and enforcement history left it blameless.

The city did win part of that fight separately. On 9 September 2026, days before trial, a settlement of the city's crossclaims against Cornerstone and Smith was filed in the federal case. It awards the city $2,055,000, of which $2,035,000 runs against Cornerstone and $20,000 against Smith, following a March ruling that granted the city summary judgment on its trespass and Environmental Legal Action claims. Smith had earlier sued the city and state agencies for $700,000 over lost personal property at the site.

Will the City of Richmond appeal the fire verdict?

It may, but not immediately in the ordinary course. At the Common Council meeting on 21 September the mayor's office expressed disappointment with the verdict, highlighted the roughly $2.1 million crossclaim settlement, and urged council members to coordinate with corporate counsel as the city evaluates its legal options and potential remediation of the former Hofco property. No notice of appeal has been reported.

The procedural posture matters. A liability verdict in a class action with damages still to be determined is not usually a final judgment under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Absent a Rule 54(b) partial judgment or a certified interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b), the city's realistic next steps are post-trial motions in the district court, with an appeal to the Seventh Circuit once a judgment is entered. The window to seek interlocutory review of class certification itself under Rule 23(f), 14 days from the certification order, closed in October 2025.

Two features of Indiana law are likely to frame any appeal or settlement discussion.

Does the Indiana Tort Claims Act cap what Richmond has to pay?

Yes. For claims arising after 1 January 2008, Indiana Code § 34-13-3-4 limits a governmental entity's liability to $700,000 per person and $5,000,000 for all injuries to all persons from a single occurrence, and punitive damages are not recoverable against a governmental entity. A single industrial fire is the paradigm of a single occurrence, so the city's aggregate exposure to the class is capped at $5 million however large a class-wide award becomes. Cornerstone and Smith have no statutory cap, but a 60% share is only as valuable as their ability to pay.

Why the 40% allocation may be contested

Indiana's Comparative Fault Act, Indiana Code § 34-51-2-2, provides that it "does not apply in any manner" to tort claims against governmental entities or public employees under the Tort Claims Act. Claims against a government defendant are instead governed by common-law principles, including contributory negligence. How a jury allocation among a city and private defendants operates when the fault-allocation statute excludes the city is the kind of question post-trial motions and any appeal are likely to test. No party's position on it has been reported, and the district court has not ruled on it.

The second track: a state-court mass action and the Seventh Circuit

The federal class action is not the only Richmond plastics fire lawsuit. About 150 residents filed a separate suit in Wayne County Circuit Court seeking compensatory and punitive damages for negligence, nuisance, trespass and emotional distress, naming Cornerstone, My-Way Trading, Smith and the city. The defendants removed it to federal court as a "mass action" under the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), and the district court sent it back.

On 18 June 2026, in Craig v. City of Richmond, No. 26-1864, the Seventh Circuit affirmed the remand in an opinion by Chief Judge Michael Brennan. Deciding the point for the first time in the circuit, the panel held that CAFA's exclusion for claims arising from "an event or occurrence in the State" where the suit was filed, which resulted in injuries in that state or contiguous states, is jurisdictional, so it can be raised at any time and by the court on its own motion. All claims arose from a single local event, the fire, so federal jurisdiction was lacking.

Back in state court, Cornerstone sought a change of venue because Wayne County itself had become involved through cross-claims. Judge April Drake offered Randolph, Henry, Fayette and Union counties; after each side struck one, the case landed in Henry County Circuit Court. The result is two tracks over one fire: a federal class of evacuees with a liability verdict in hand, and a state mass action of about 150 plaintiffs pleading bodily-injury and punitive-damages theories that the federal class no longer carries against the city.

Timeline

Date	Event
2019	Unsafe Building Commission orders NW F Street buildings repaired, demolished or vacated
2021	City acquires two parcels through tax-sale proceedings
11 April 2023	Fire starts; half-mile evacuation of about 2,000 people
16 April 2023	Evacuation order lifted
2023	Craig and Stokes file federal class action (No. 1:23-cv-01575)
29 September 2025	Judge Pratt certifies class with two subclasses
27 March 2026	Summary-judgment order narrows claims against the city
18 June 2026	Seventh Circuit affirms remand of 150-plaintiff mass action (No. 26-1864)
9 September 2026	City's $2,055,000 crossclaim settlement with Cornerstone and Smith filed
11 September 2026	Court quashes subpoena seeking a local journalist's testimony as unduly burdensome
14-18 September 2026	Five-day jury trial; verdict against all three defendants
21 September 2026	Mayor's office tells Common Council the city is weighing an appeal

What happens next in the Richmond fire lawsuit?

The court now has to decide how damages for the remaining class members will be determined. Reporting after the verdict says the court will begin considering the other class members' claims, but no schedule, claims form or damages methodology has been made public. Expect three things to run in parallel: post-trial motions by the city and possibly the private defendants; a process for proving or estimating each subclass member's losses; and, given the $5 million cap on the city and the uncertain collectability of Cornerstone and Smith, pressure toward a negotiated class-wide settlement that would require notice and court approval under Rule 23(e).

What it means for municipalities, class counsel and mass-tort firms

For cities and counties. Enforcement records cut both ways. The unsafe-building findings Richmond generated in 2019 were meant to show diligence; at trial they showed knowledge. A municipality that takes title to a nuisance property through tax-sale or abandonment proceedings acquires the premises-liability profile of an owner, and a Tort Claims Act cap limits the size of the loss, not the finding of fault.

For class counsel. The verdict is a working example of an issue-focused liability trial in an environmental-disaster class: certify around a single occurrence and a defined evacuation zone, try common negligence and nuisance questions with two representatives, and leave individualized damages for later. It also shows the trade-off. Personal-injury damages requiring expert proof were stripped from the claims against the city before trial, so the class recovery against Richmond will be property and displacement damages.

For mass-tort and PI firms. The Seventh Circuit's CAFA ruling makes single-event industrial disasters easier to keep in state court when plaintiffs choose a mass action over a class. Firms representing people with bodily-injury claims from the same event now have a state forum in which the federal class's summary-judgment limits do not directly apply, but they also face the same Tort Claims Act cap: on the statute's text, recoveries from the city in both forums draw on one $5 million limit for all persons injured in a single occurrence.

For defendants in parallel tracks. A crossclaim settlement between co-defendants, like Richmond's $2.06 million deal with Cornerstone and Smith, does not bind the plaintiffs and did not stop the jury from allocating 40% to the city. Defendants who settle among themselves before trial should expect the jury to allocate fault on its own terms.

Frequently asked questions

Who was found liable for the Richmond, Indiana plastics fire?

The City of Richmond, Cornerstone Trading Group, LLC and Cornerstone's owner, Seth Smith, were all found negligent and liable in nuisance by a federal jury on 18 September 2026, with fault split 40% / 30% / 30%.

When will Richmond fire class members be paid?

No payment date exists. Class-wide damages have not been determined, post-trial motions and a possible appeal are expected, and any recovery against the city is capped at $5 million in aggregate under the Indiana Tort Claims Act.

Do I qualify for the Richmond fire class action?

The certified class covers people within the half-mile evacuation zone ordered on 11 April 2023, split into property owners and non-owner residents; 3,594 people were notified that they may qualify. Eligibility in any individual case turns on the class definition in the court's order.

Can the City of Richmond be ordered to pay punitive damages?

No. Indiana law bars punitive damages against a governmental entity, and the city's compensatory liability is limited to $700,000 per person and $5 million per occurrence.

Is the Henry County lawsuit part of the class action?

No. It is a separate state-court suit by about 150 residents that the Seventh Circuit kept out of federal court under CAFA's local event exception; it now sits in Henry County Circuit Court.