Back in 1960, a gas company installed a steel service, gas riser, and meter at a Texas home. For over sixty years, the company performed no maintenance other than replacing the meter twice. They also had no system to monitor for gas leaks. In the home lived a 62-year-old mother and her 46-year-old son. The mother and her son were intellectually disabled with IQs below 60. The mother was nonverbal, and she had been living with her son since she gave birth to him at 15 years of age. One evening, the landlord came to the house checking on the tenants. She detected gas but was confused as the gas was shut off and there were no gas appliances. The worried landlord elected to stay on the vacant side of the residence. Later that night, the son went to fry up a pork chop in the kitchen, unaware of the invisible threat permeating the air. The natural gas ignited, and an explosion ripped through the home, bursting through the roof. A twisting inferno engulfed the home while debris fluttered throughout the neighborhood.
The mother had been in an adjoining room and sustained second-degree burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, and a serious air embolism. However, her son took the brunt of the blast. He suffered second- and third-degree burns to over 40% of his body. During his 29-day hospital stay, surgeons harvested 25% of his flesh for skin grafts. For the rest of his life, he would intermittently suffer terrible neurological pain from the 65% of his skin that had been charred or grafted. To make matters worse, the familiar environment and routines that helped structure their lives had been destroyed. Both the mother and son psychologically struggled to cope with the explosion’s catastrophic aftermath.
Police and fire departments were dispatched within minutes. Additionally, the gas company had been monitoring fire department calls and sent a leak team to the scene within 40 minutes of the explosion. The team discovered that the gas meter outside was ablaze and had been on fire for hours. They conducted their own investigation and effectively had control of the scene until the city cleared away the ruined home. Curiously, the gas company determined their natural gas was not the cause of the explosion. By the time the family hired Mike Lyons — a founding partner of Lyons & Simmons with 27 years of experience in catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death cases — nothing remained of the blast scene.
Without access to the scene, Mike was forced to depend on the data the gas company had — or had not — collected. However, the fire and police departments eventually concluded that the explosion was, in fact, caused by a gas leak. Mike knew that his biggest obstacle would be to disprove the reliability of the gas company’s investigation. But with the house wiped clean off its foundation, he faced the challenge of demonstrating exactly where the gas could have leaked in from.
With the case headed to trial, Mike knew he had two buckets of information that had to be conveyed to the jury. First, he knew — based on feedback from focus groups he polled — that the jury needed to see how all of the circumstances surrounding the blast, including its force and impact, added up to this being a natural gas explosion. Second, he had made the ethical decision to not ask his two severely injured Plaintiffs with intellectual disabilities to sit through the trial, where their trauma would be replayed and examined. As such, he needed to show the jury the severity of the Plaintiffs’ injuries while also not desensitizing the jurors with shocking and gruesome photographs of the burns.
Mike had seen DK Global’s 3D illustration work with the Astroworld case and brought them onboard. In addition, he also retained Dr. Rodney Chan, chief of plastic surgery at Brook Army Medical Center, who had worked extensively with burn and combat injuries. Dr. Chan worked hand-in-hand with DK Global to illustrate the damage of severe burns on a cellular level, as well as to recreate the entirety of the second Plaintiff’s horrific injuries. The end result was a 3D animation that was medically accurate without being “gory.” During the trial, Dr. Chan incorporated all of the illustrations in his testimony.
The DK Global 3D animation began by zooming down into the state of Texas and settling on an overhead view of the neighborhood. Following this, the camera toured a 3D recreation of the exterior of the house and then the interior floorplan. The locations of the first natural gas smells were highlighted in red, followed by the origin of the explosion. The scene then cut to a 3D animation of the son cooking, the stove illuminated in red. Next, his mother was shown on the couch and the landlord was depicted in bed asleep. The animation moved to examining the meter outside while labeling its parts. After this, the explosion was reenacted and showcased the roof being blown off and the fire engulfing the house. The second half of the demonstrative animated the event timelines and displayed the key report findings.
The second demonstrative was a “Burns Summary” PowerPoint presentation with 18 slides. Medical illustrations visually explained the severity of second- and third-degree burns and included descriptions of their symptomologies. Throughout the remaining slides, a 3D reconstruction of the son’s full body showed every single one of his burns, skin graft sites, and the muscular deformity of his calf, while also detailing the full extent of his medical damages. The Plaintiff’s skin graft procedures with a Watson knife were also illustrated.
At trial, Michael cross-examined the gas company’s corporate designee. He took apart the data the company had collected by showing how each of their conclusions was either flawed or compromised. Next, he demonstrated how the company’s liability expert was biased by revealing that the expert had always concluded that the companies who hired him were never at fault. Eventually, the Defense suggested the jury award $500,000 for the son’s 29-day hospital stay. Michael proposed the jury take that number and multiply it by 65 (given that 65% of the victim’s body had been burned or grafted) and then again for the disfigurement, pain, disability, and past and future suffering. While the jury deliberated, three alternate jurors sat with the attorneys. One of them said that not only would they have awarded all damages, but they would have asked for more. Upon hearing this, the Defense attorneys fretted and proposed a high-low agreement of $8,000,000 on the low and $60,000,000 on the high end, to which Michael agreed and the court accepted. Within four hours, the jury returned with a verdict of $109,500,000. Thanks to the Lyons & Simmons trial team’s intelligent presentation of the evidence in a way the jury could understand and use, the injured family was able to have their medical and housing needs met for the rest of their lives.
Michael Lyons, a founding partner of Lyons & Simmons, has concentrated his practice on personal injury and wrongful death cases. Over the past 27 years of practice, he has obtained verdicts, awards, and settlements totaling over a billion dollars on behalf of his clients. Lyons has been consistently recognized as a top 100 lawyer in the State of Texas by Super Lawyers and as a Top 500 lawyer in the country by Lawdragon. He has been recognized by the Dallas Trial Lawyer’s Association with the John Howie Award. Just in the past several years, Lyons has been involved in some of the most significant personal injury verdicts nationally.
In 2023, he was part of a trial team that secured an $860 million jury verdict for the family of a victim killed when a tower crane collapsed and fell on an apartment building in Dallas, Texas. The incident and the trial were a national news story. In 2022, Lyons was named to the Plaintiff’s Executive Committee in In Re: Astroworld Festival Litigation related to the tragic events involving the deaths of 10 people at the Astroworld Festival Concert in 2021. Lyons is among a handful of attorneys selected for the Plaintiffs’ leadership of this mass casualty litigation. In April of 2024, Lyons was part of a trial team that secured a $37.5 million verdict against Oncor Energy in a trucking fatality case. In December of 2022, Lyons obtained a $10.1 million verdict in an emergency room delay case that was streamed live by Courthouse View Network. It was tabbed by CVN as one of the “Top 10 Most Impressive Plaintiff Verdicts of 2022” because of the case’s complexity and difficulty. In 2021, Lyons was lead counsel where a Midland County jury awarded the largest verdict in a wrongful death case in the county’s history. Midland is one of the most conservative counties in Texas.
