Negligence – Disability insurer denied summary judgment in lawsuit over rescission

Where passengers who were injured when their vehicle’s driver fell asleep and struck a tractor-trailer illegally parked on the shoulder area of a highway sued the tractor trailer driver and his employer, a jury will decide if the tractor trailer driver’s negligence or the vehicle driver’s negligence was the proximate cause of the accident.

Background

This case arises from a motor vehicle accident on Interstate 81 in Montgomery County, Virginia. Defendant Joshua Flores, a truck driver, had illegally parked his tractor-trailer for the night in the shoulder area of an acceleration lane exiting a rest stop in Montgomery County. Shortly before 7:30 a.m., the tractor-trailer was struck from behind by a Ford Explorer driven by Jose Lopez, who had fallen asleep behind the wheel. Jaime Flores Landaverde suffered a traumatic brain injury and Beberlyn Alvarez Lopez was killed.

Lopez is also a defendant in this case. Plaintiffs allege that his negligence, along with Flores’s, “combined or individually, proximately caused” to the crash. Plaintiffs raise negligence and respondeat superior claims against Joshua Flores and Move Freight Trucking LLC. These defendants move for summary judgment on the issues of proximate cause and gross negligence.

Proximate cause

Move Freight Trucking, LLC and Joshua Flores argue that Lopez’s negligence was the proximate cause of the collision, rather than Flores’s decision to park the truck in the shoulder of the acceleration lane. Move Freight and Flores compare the facts of this case to those in Virginia Stage Lines, Inc. v. Brockman Chevrolet, Inc., 209 Va. 188 (1939), and Riggle v. Wadell, 216 Va. 577 (1976). In each of those cases, a vehicle had stopped, at least partially, on a highway, and subsequent drivers to the scene collided with the stopped vehicles.

This comparison ignores the fact that in Riggle, safety flares, flashing lights and other warning devices were present to warn oncoming drivers. Here, there is no evidence that Lopez had any such warnings, inside of the car or in the form of safety triangles or flares around Flores’s and Move Freight’s illegally parked truck. Virginia Stage Lines provides defendants with even less support.

Virginia courts have concluded that whether a vehicle stopped on a highway was a proximate cause of an accident presents a jury question. In this case, whether the alleged negligence of Flores in parking his tractor-trailer “continued until the time of the accident and proximately contributed to it in the slightest degree, or whether [his] negligence had ceased to operate and was superseded by the negligence of [Lopez] present . . . questions of fact for determination by the jury, not questions of law for the court.”

Plaintiffs have presented evidence to support an inference that Flores’s placement of the truck on the shoulder of the highway, “in a diagonal position that obstructed part of the roadway,” blocking the built-in “recovery area” for wayward drivers was more than a “remote cause” of this accident. The issue of proximate cause in this case is an issue of fact to be decided by the jury.

Gross/wanton negligence

“Because ‘the standard for gross negligence in Virginia is one of indifference, not adequacy,’ a claim for gross negligence must fail as a matter of law when the evidence shows that the defendants exercised some degree of care.” Here, it is indisputable that Flores attempted to park at the rest stop, and parked alongside other similarly-situated trucks outside the lanes of active traffic in an attempt to not become an obstacle to the road.

Because a claim for gross negligence fails as a matter of law when the evidence shows that the defendants exercised some degree of care, movants are entitled to summary judgment on the issue of gross negligence. The court’s finding that Flores exercised some degree of care also forecloses, as a matter of law, plaintiff’s claims of willful and wanton negligence and punitive damages.

Defendant Move Freight and Flores’s motion for summary judgment granted in part, denied in part.

Milne v. Move Freight Trucking LLC, Case Nos. 7:23-cv-432, 7:23-cv-433, March 31, 2026. WDVA at Roanoke (Urbanski). VLW 026-3-157. 19 pp.

Full-Text Opinion

VLW 026-3-157

Virginia Lawyers Weekly