The Washington Post · Trisha Thadani
MIAMI – When first responder Jonathan Saldana arrived to a crash site in Key Largo in April 2019, he saw a bloodied and unresponsive 27-year-old man sprawled on the asphalt. At first, Saldana thought the man was the only one hit by the Tesla driver at the scene. Then his colleague noticed a pair of flip-flops.
Dozens of feet away, paramedics dug through the bushes and found the man’s girlfriend, 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon, dead. As the body-camera footage of this search played for a federal courtroom here this week, the man who survived the crash, Dillon Angulo, now 33, wiped his eyes and hung his head. Benavides Leon’s mother, face damp with tears, briskly walked out of the room.
Tesla has repeatedlyavoided the kind of emotional and highly technical trial that it is facing in Miami by settling at least four such cases out of court. Just days before jury selection began for this case about a distracted Tesla driver using Autopilot, the company resolved a lawsuit over a separate 2019 crash involving an inattentive driver using its driver-assistance technology. It similarly settled three other alleged defect-related cases in the past year before proceedings started. But this case moved forward, providing a remarkable window into Tesla’s defense of its evolving technology and statements by its controversial CEO – all as a grieving family watches.
“The sympathy you’re going to feel for this family, it’s going to be hard to put that aside,” Tesla attorney Joel Smith said in his opening remarks to the jurors this week. “As much as Tesla would love to have been able to stop this vehicle in this crash … or any other crash, the technology just didn’t exist. It was not state-of-the-art at the time.”
At issue is how much Autopilot, Musk’s driver-assistance technology, is to blame for the 2019 crash in Key Largo. Benavides Leon’s family sued the driver and reached a settlement. The family and Angulo later filed a joint federal lawsuit against Tesla last year, alleging its Autopilot system failed to warn the Tesla’s driver, George McGee, that the road was ending as he looked down to pick up his dropped cellphone. Tesla is placing sole blame on McGee, citing the company’s terms and conditions that deemthe driver ultimately responsible for the vehicle no matter what feature is engaged.
Tesla previously faced two California juries in 2023 for alleged defects and was found not liable in both cases.
Inside the courtroom in Miami this week, the Benavides Leon family, along with Angulo and his father, have attentively listened as attorneys dissected the crucial seconds leading up to the crash, argued the nuances of Tesla’s Autopilot technology, sparred over whether Tesla chief executive Elon Musk exaggerated its capabilities, and debated whether the tragedy could have been avoided at all. Again and again, the families endured replays of dash-cam footage showing McGee’s Tesla hurtling toward the unsuspecting couple.
Outside the courtroom, Musk provides a complicated backdrop to the question of whether his company acted recklessly. Last month, Tesla launched its fully autonomous Robotaxi in Austin, despite a lack of federal regulation and clear safety guidelines. Beyond Tesla, Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, came under fire last week after launching into an antisemitic rant after Musk said it was programmed to be less politically correct.And debate has erupted over whether cuts spearheaded by the U.S. DOGE Service – which Musk created under the Trump administration – may have contributed to critical personnel gaps during the recent catastrophic flooding in Texas.
When a room of potential jurors were asked ahead of the trial whether they held any strong feelings about Musk, and if those feelings would cause an issue for impartiality, several raised their hands.
Smith said this case is not about Musk or his technology. Instead, he said, it’s about an “aggressive” and “distracted driver.”
Plaintiffs attorney Brett Schreiber agreed that McGee is to blame for killing Benavides Leon and catastrophically injuring Angulo.
“We do not run from that fact,” Schreiber told the jury. “But the evidence in this case will show that every actor needs a stage. And Tesla set the stage for the preventable tragedy that brings us all here.”
Confidential settlements
Six weeks before McGee’s Tesla plowed into the young couple, Jeremy Banner was driving to work in Delray Beach, Florida, in his red Tesla Model 3 with Autopilot engaged. Seconds after Banner’s hands were no longer detected on the wheel, the Tesla rammed into a semitruck and slid underneath the trailer. Banner, 50, died on impact.
Banner’s family sued, filing one of the first Autopilot-related lawsuits against the company. Last week, after six years of litigation, the family’s attorney, Trey Lytal, said they settled with the company for a confidential amount – marking at least the fourth time that a case linking a passenger’s death to an alleged vehicle design defect settled just before going to trial.
In April, Tesla agreed to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the estate of a man killed in 2021 after his Tesla allegedly suddenly accelerated, crashed and caught fire near Dayton, Ohio.
In April of last year, the company settled over a high-profile suit in Northern California that claimed the company’s Autopilot technology played a role in the fatal crash of an Apple engineer. Less than two months later, the company settled another case in Indianapolis linking a passenger’s death to an alleged vehicle design defect – unrelated to Autopilot – that caused the car to burst into flames after it suddenly accelerated into a tree and adjacent parking structure.
Lytal attended the first few days of the Benavides-Angulo trial in Miami after his case settled. He said the Banner family’s lawsuit inspired other Autopilot-related cases and provided a blueprint for other litigation against Tesla. Several other lawsuits are pending against the company around the country, and some of them could head to trial in the next few years.
Tesla denied wrongdoing in each of the lawsuits it settled. A representative for Tesla declined to comment on the confidential settlements.
“We’ve been working on the case for over a half a decade, it has been a long fight,” Lytal told The Washington Post. “But on behalf of the family, we’re happy that has led to all these cases.”
In Riverside, California, in 2023, where Tesla was found not liable for the alleged role of its Autopilot technology in a fatal crash, the verdict came after a month-long trial and several days of deliberation from the jury. After the verdict was announced, Jonathan Michaels, the lawyer for the victim’s estate, told The Post that Tesla had been “pushed to its limits during the trial.”
“The jury’s prolonged deliberation suggests that the verdict still casts a shadow of uncertainty,” he said.
Punitive damages
In Miami, the attorneys for Angulo and Benavides Leon’s family face a difficult defense. Tesla vehicles repeatedly warn drivers about the limitations, and McGee told police at the scene – and in subsequent deposition testimony – that he knew he was responsible for his car’s trajectory.
However, District Judge Beth Bloom, who is presiding over the case, ruled last month that the jury may consider punitive damages against Tesla and potentially subject it to a steep financial penalty. That gives the jury leeway to fully absolve Tesla of liability or deem it partially or fully responsible.
Bloom’s ruling rests on Tesla’s decision to allow its technology to operate on roads other than those it was designed for, namely those with dividers, clear lane markings and no cross traffic. “A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” she wrote.
What also sets this case apart is that the driver is alive to tell the jury – and the victims – what he did and didn’t think Musk’s technology was capable of.
McGee, expected to take the stand next week, told police at the scene that he was driving on “cruise” when he looked down after dropping his phone and then “ran the stop sign and hit the guy’s car.”
“This poor guy, this poor guy,” McGee could be heard saying out of frame, as the paramedic’s body camera focused on Angulo laying in a pool of blood. “This is bad.”
Editor’s note: The law firm suing Tesla, Singleton Schreiber LLLP, operates in multiple states, including New Mexico. The firm has provided general operating support for Citizen Media Group in the past. The firm, like all sponsors, has no influence or pre-approval of stories covered by our publication.
