By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A Jasper County jury decided Thursday that the operator of a Joplin salvage business should not be held financially responsible in the death of a man who was crushed by a storage box that was being unloaded from a truck.

Jurors returned a verdict in favor of defendant John Meyer of John Meyer Truck and Foreign Salvage at the conclusion of a four-day trial in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.

Family members of Michael Ellis Sr. had sued Meyer and his business for his alleged role in the death of Ellis on Oct. 7, 2007, in Galena, Kan. Testimony at the trial established that a large storage box that Meyer was helping Ellis move toppled onto Ellis and the tractor he was driving to pull it off a flatbed tow truck.

Meyer owned both the tow truck and the tractor, and provided the use of them to Ellis to help move the storage box onto a concrete pad at property in Galena that Ellis was leasing from Meyer.

“Owners of equipment are not allowed to needlessly endanger the lives of the public,” Shelly Dreyer, the attorney for the plaintiffs, told jurors during closing arguments.

The plaintiffs maintained that Meyer failed to ensure safe unloading of the box from the raised bed of the tow truck by not first securing it with a winch. They also maintained that he contributed to the accident by driving the tow truck forward a short distance from the pad as Ellis was pulling the box the opposite direction with the tractor.

The defendant maintained that he was assisting Ellis by providing the equipment to move the box onto the property, and that he did so as a friend and not for business gain. The defense further maintained that Meyer had been a mere bystander at the accident scene, and that Ellis had made the decision to try to pull the box off with the tractor.

“Nobody saw him drive the truck,” attorney James Nordstrom said in reference to his client. “Nobody saw him in the truck.”

But the plaintiffs maintained that Meyer was the one with experience in operating the tow truck, that he did stand to gain financially by moving the Ellis family onto the property, and that he should have known to use a winch to ensure that the box would not topple over.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a friend,” Dreyer told the jury. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a customer. You just don’t do it.”

Dreyer asked during closing arguments for a verdict awarding $400,000 in damages to the decedent’s widow, Wilma Ellis, and $250,000 each to the couple’s adult children, Laura Drake and Michael Ellis Jr. The plaintiffs deserved an additional $7,579 for funeral expenses, bringing “a fair and reasonable” total award for damages to $907,579.16, Dreyer said.

Nordstrom argued that the plaintiffs had not presented any evidence of financial loss other than a funeral bill.

Jurors were being asked to assign percentages of comparative fault for the accident to Meyer and Ellis, which would have figured into the calculation of any award to the plaintiffs. But assignments of comparative fault were rendered mute when the jury returned the verdict in favor of the defendant after three hours and 15 minutes of deliberation.