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A jury in Texas has awarded $150 billion in damages to the family of a man who died 12 years after he was horrifically burned on his eighth birthday in what is reportedly the largest personal injury award in U.S. history.
Lawyer Craig Sico said his clients don't expect to collect any of the $150 billion judgment. Instead, they hope it will help persuade prosecutors to seek charges against a man they say doused Robbie Middleton with gasoline and set him on fire.
Middleton survived his horrific injuries for 12 years before dying last year of a rare form of skin cancer, which attorneys argued was related to the extensive burns.
Middleton's mother, Colleen Middleton, said Wednesday the family hadn't really thought about the size of the judgment.
"We're never going to see any money," she said. "What we thought was please let these people realize Robert was precious, like everybody else's child, and he didn't deserve this."
Robbie Middleton was attacked on June 28, 1998 — his eighth birthday — as he walked through a wooded area in the Southeast Texas town of Splendora, northeast of Houston. A neighbor who discovered the boy told a 911 dispatcher that the burned child said, "Some kids threw the gas on him."
When police questioned the boy, who was burned over 99 percent of his body, he told them: "Don did it."
Collins, who was 13 at the time, was taken into custody five days later. He was held in juvenile detention for six weeks before he was released without charges to the custody of an uncle appointed as his legal guardian.
Montgomery County Attorney David Walker said Collins was not charged because "the case was very, very difficult, with evidence that was not clear or necessarily compelling at that time."
He said Middleton was severely injured and "his ability to say what had happened and who did this horrible crime to him was extremely difficult."
In a video deposition taken just before he died last year, Middleton identified Collins as a person who sexually assaulted him about two weeks before the fire attack.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45761980/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/