Survivors: “Something so preventable”
Nicole Walters was a year from graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It’s where her parents Michael and Jill had met and where her brother Nicholas was planning to join her in less than a month.
An exhausted truck driver changed all of that.
“The world kind of just flipped upside down,” Nicholas Walters, 20, said. “It’s trying to find your way without the two most supportive people, which makes it extremely difficult to do.”
On June 30, 2017, the Walterses were headed to Nebraska to visit family when a pickup truck driver slammed into their SUV, killing Michael and Jill, injuring the siblings and killing the two dogs.
Nicole Walters, 23, thinks about how much life has changed. She graduated a semester late as she tried to pick up the pieces after the crash.
“We’re so different now than we were before, and I don’t know that you can ever go back to who you were before, so it’s finding out who you are now,
too,” she said. “That’s already hard when you’re in your 20s, and now, it’s that much more difficult.”
The Walters siblings on Monday were awarded $26.6 million by a Denver jury in a wrongful death lawsuit against driver Mark Bollinger and CWRV Transport LLC, the company he was working for. Bollinger had fallen asleep at the wheel and pleaded guilty last year to careless driving charges in Logan County District Court.
The jury in the civil trial agreed that Bollinger should be considered an agent of the company even though he was employed as a private contractor. It’s a verdict that could force trucking companies to make changes because of the jury’s view of the employment relationship between the driver and the company.
The Walterses pursued civil action to make a change in sleepy driving habits and within the trucking industry, including ensuring that drivers log hours and companies take responsibility for driver actions while on the job.
“This is one of the big things that we think will help make the industry safer, the finding that the driver is actually an agent of the company, not an independent contractor,” said Greenwood Village attorney Dan Caplis, who represented the Walterses with partner Babar Waheed.
Companies will claim their drivers are independent contractors so they can make a profit but not pay benefits or be held liable “when they create carnage,” Caplis said.
An effort to reach Indiana-based CWRV Transport on Wednesday was unsuccessful. The company works with contractors who use their own pickup trucks to haul RVs, according to its website. Bollinger had dropped off an RV in Indiana that morning and was headed back when he crashed into the Walterses, Nicole Walters said.
The Walters siblings plan to use some of the money to raise awareness about fatigued driving and hold trucking companies accountable for their workers’ actions as they did with CWRV Transport. They started the website wakeupdrivesafe.com and hope to talk to driver education and commercial driver classes.
“It just really made me angry,” Nicole said. “It’s something so preventable.”
The Littleton residents on June 30, 2017, were headed to Nebraska to spend July 4 with family, driving on Interstate 76. Nicole was driving a GMC Yukon with dad Michael, 54, in the passenger seat. Nicholas and mom Jill, 50, were in the back. Nicholas had just graduated high school and planned to join Nicole, who was home for the summer, in Nebraska for college.
At about 2:30 p.m., traffic stopped near Sterling due to a coal ash spill. Bollinger, driving a Dodge Ram, plowed into the SUV, pushing it into another car. Michael died while being flown by helicopter to a hospital, and Jill died on July 20 from her injuries. Nicholas’ pelvis was fractured and Nicole’s neck was injured. They also suffer from PTSD.
Bollinger pleaded guilty in 2018 to two charges of careless driving resulting in death and one charge of careless driving resulting in injury. He was fined and given a three-year suspended jail sentence, pending completion of two years of probation and 208 hours of community service.
To Nicholas and Nicole, that wasn’t justice. Nicholas felt like his parents were cheated.
The weekend before the verdict was announced, the Walterses went to the cemetery. It was the first time Nicole felt a sense of justice because the trucking company had to provide some answers.
“With the jury agreeing with us that he was on the job and that they should be responsible for him, that made it that much more powerful,” she said.
Since the wreck, Nicole smiles and laughs less and Nicholas’ oneliners fell by the wayside.
“Happiness is hard to come by,” he said.
But the sister and brother light up when talking about their parents.
Michael and Jill Walters loved dogs. Sophie, or Sofie depending on who you ask, and Izzy died in the crash.
Jill was spunky and always on the go, a vice president of sales who always made time for her kids. Mike, an IT manager, was the dad who packed fun lunches, stopped to help anyone in need and one year was Girl Scout cookie mom.
“They were just the parents who gave us opportunity that they thought might help us,” Nicholas said.
Now, life is a little harder. “Everyday, there’s something new you think of or I find that I think, ‘Man, I wish I could ask my parents like, How long do you grill chicken?’ It’s the little things that you rely on them for,” Nicole said. “And so making decisions about what you want to do with your life and finding your path to a career is much more difficult.”