$30M settlement going to family of Wagener teacher killed by utility pole
WAGENER, S.C. - The family of Jeunelle Robinson, a Wagener-Salley High School teacher struck in the head and killed by a rotting 70-year-old utility pole, will get $30 million through a wrongful-death settlement reached Thursday.
It comes almost a year to the day after her death.
The 113-page lawsuit alleges the condition of the poles and power lines in Wagener played a large part in Robinson’s death.
Electric company Dominion Energy, which installed a light on the pole, and communications company Comporium, which owned a drooping pole line in downtown Wagener that was no longer in use, both signed off on the agreement.
It resolved a wrongful-death suit brought by Robinson’s family, according to documents filed in Aiken County.
Last Aug. 16, a truck snagged the line, pulling it like a rubber band until it broke the poles and launched one into the air, striking Robinson, who was walking south on Main Street during her lunch break as a social studies teacher, authorities said. The truck had a legal height, they said.
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Surveillance video from a nearby store shows Robinson, 31, try to dodge something before the pole strikes her, flipping her body around violently. She died a short time later at the hospital.
“We appreciate the leadership of Dominion and Comporium for working with us to ensure Jeunelle’s family would not have to relive this tragedy in court unnecessarily,” the family’s lawyer, Justin Bamberg, said in a statement.
The settlement agreement does not detail how much each company will have to pay of the $30 million settlement and Bamberg’s law office said that would not be released.
The exact age of the poles isn’t known because records are no longer available. Markings on them haven’t been made in over 60 years. However, the 69-year-old mayor of Wagener said shortly after Robinson’s death that he recognized a bottlecap he had nailed to one of the poles when he was a boy.
The lawsuit includes several photos of utility poles and other equipment that the defendants say show “decrepit infrastructure in Wagener that is dangerous to the public, abandoned, well outside its safe and effective operational life, and needs replacement or removal.”
Here are some of the examples included in the lawsuit:
A little more than a month before Robinson’s death, Dominion announced a plan to begin replacing equipment that was more than 60 years old in Wagener.
Bamberg said he hopes Dominion and Comporium will use the tragedy to pay attention to inspecting and replacing aging utility poles and other infrastructure that are potentially dangerous, especially in small towns.
Dominion spokeswoman Rhonda Maree O’Banion said in a statement that the company was pleased to resolve the case and extended its deepest sympathies to Robinson’s family. The Associated Press left phone and email messages with Comporium.
The family plans to use some of the settlement to create the “Jeunelle Robinson Teacher’s Hope Fund” to provide school supplies and other items to teachers around the country.
They ed how Robinson worked her way up from a substitute to her job teaching at the high school and how she often spent her own money and time for her students.
“She loved her class. She loved her students,” Robinson’s father, Donovan Julian, said in March when the lawsuit was filed. “She was a light taken too soon. She was a joy.”
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