Texas Appeals Court Overturns $1.73 Million Union Pacific Verdict Over Speculative Medical Projections

A Texas appellate court struck down a $1.73 million personal injury verdict against Union Pacific Railroad Co., wiping out a lower court judgment after finding that an injured rail worker relied on speculative medical forecasts to inflate his damages.

Crash impact was minimal. On August 14, 2021, railroad employee Travis Gozan was riding as a belted passenger inside a lightweight Kawasaki Mule utility vehicle across a railyard when the driver lost control, hopped a small curb, and slammed into a building. The cart traveled no faster than 14 mph before the collision, which operators blamed on sudden brake failure. Gozan walked away from the wreckage under his own power. Hours later, disoriented and suffering from sharp lower back pain radiating down his leg alongside severe headaches and shoulder stiffness, his father drove him to an emergency room.

Initial diagnostic scans showed nothing broken. Emergency clinicians ran X-rays and a CT scan, diagnosed Gozan with an acute lumbar muscle strain, and anticipated he would return to his shift within two weeks. Instead, he stayed off work for more than seven months. Gozan underwent rounds of physical therapy and visited an orthopaedic surgeon whose follow-up MRI scans returned entirely normal findings. The specialist cleared him to resume work without physical restrictions. Yet Gozan insisted he could not sit without severe discomfort, prompting a pain management physician to diagnose him with coccydynia—chronic inflammation of the tailbone.

Federal Liability and Competing Medical Diagnoses

Gozan sued the rail carrier under the Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA), asserting Union Pacific failed to maintain a safe work environment or properly instruct staff on operating utility carts. During trial, medical experts identified two persistent ailments stemming from the incident: coccydynia and myofascial pain syndrome, a muscular disorder producing painful trigger points that doctors linked to his headaches.

Union Pacific fought the claims aggressively. Defense medical experts insisted a 14-mph bumper collision could not trigger long-term trauma, pointing to Gozan's preexisting hypertension and prescription medications for attention deficit disorder as the genuine source of his head pain.

Yet under federal rail statutes, the legal threshold for causation remains uniquely low. An injured employee does not need to prove an employer's negligence served as the primary cause of an injury; demonstrating that negligence played even the slightest role suffices. The appellate panel confirmed the trial record contained enough baseline evidence to link the railyard crash to both chronic pain conditions.

Evidentiary Breakdown and the Speculative $1.1 Million Botox Projection

But the jury's $1,732,000 financial award fell apart on judicial review. The jury had granted Gozan $1 million for future medical treatment, $390,000 for future pain and suffering, $150,000 for future physical impairment, alongside substantial payouts for mental anguish. The centerpiece of that calculation was a life care planner's 26-year medical care estimate totaling roughly $1.52 million—an assessment where more than $1.1 million was earmarked entirely for routine Botox injections to suppress headaches.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals dismantled that projection as pure guesswork. Gozan's treating neurologist had merely mentioned Botox as a hypothetical alternative if conventional therapies failed. The specialist had never written a prescription, and the hired planner never consulted Gozan's treating doctors to determine clinical necessity or injection frequency.

Past and future mental anguish awards collapsed under identical scrutiny. The appellate bench determined Gozan's courtroom testimony recounting daily frustration, workplace embarrassment, and domestic inconvenience did not satisfy Texas legal thresholds required to sustain independent mental distress awards.

Under the mandate issued by the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals, the entire case now returns to the trial docket, forcing Gozan to argue his negligence claims and substantiate his medical losses before a fresh jury.