Prairie Farms Lawsuit: $241M Verdict and $2B Travelers Suit

The Prairie Farms lawsuit is a wrongful death case in which a Madison County, Illinois jury ordered Prairie Farms Dairy, Inc. on February 27, 2026 to pay $241 million to the family of Eric Johnson, a 64-year-old courier who died in 2016 after being exposed to carbon dioxide gas from dry ice while transporting frozen strawberries for a Prairie Farms subsidiary.¹ The award included $49.5 million in compensatory damages and $191.5 million in punitive damages. A separate $2 billion federal lawsuit is now pending against Prairie Farms’ insurer, Travelers, for allegedly refusing to settle the case before trial.²

How Eric Johnson Died

Johnson owned CJS Express, a St. Louis courier service. On August 5, 2016, Prairie Farms’ subsidiary PFD Supply hired him to move frozen strawberries from its St. Charles, Missouri facility to Fayetteville, Arkansas. A PFD Supply employee loaded four coolers of strawberries packed with dry ice into Johnson’s 2016 Honda Fit, a subcompact hatchback.³

Dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. As it warms, it releases CO₂ gas that can displace breathable oxygen inside a small, closed vehicle. According to the lawsuit, no one at the facility warned Johnson of that risk or told him how to transport the cargo safely.⁴

About 90 minutes after Johnson left, a Missouri police officer found him slumped over the steering wheel of his running car in a St. Charles parking lot. The windows were closed, the doors locked, and a “strong, sharp smell” came from inside. The officer broke a window and performed CPR until paramedics arrived. Johnson died three days later at St. Joseph’s Hospital.⁵ The cause of death was asphyxiation from a high concentration of carbon dioxide in a confined space. Medical records showed no pre-existing conditions that would have explained his collapse.⁶

What the Family Alleged

Johnson’s widow, Paula Johnson, filed suit in 2017 in Madison County Circuit Court on behalf of herself, the couple’s children, and Eric Johnson’s estate. The case was docketed as 2017 L 001562, and the defendants were Prairie Farms Dairy, Inc. and its subsidiary PFD Supply.¹

The central allegation was a failure to warn. The complaint said Prairie Farms employees understood the dangers of dry ice but never told Johnson about them, and that the company had never implemented a hazard communication program for dry ice as required by the federal OSHA Hazard Communication Standard, 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1200.³ That rule requires employers to classify chemical hazards, keep written safety programs, label hazardous materials, and make sure workers, including on-site employees of other companies, have access to safety information and precautions.⁷

The $241 Million Verdict

Trial began February 19, 2026 before Judge Dennis Ruth, nearly a decade after Johnson’s death. At trial, the family’s lawyers put on evidence that OSHA had cited Prairie Farms for hazard communication violations before the 2016 incident and “several times since,” and that the company still had no proper dry ice hazard communication program when Johnson picked up his load.³ Medical evidence ruled out other explanations for Johnson’s collapse, and the responding officer’s description of the sharp smell inside the vehicle supported the CO₂ theory.⁵

On February 27, 2026, the jury returned $49.5 million in compensatory damages and $191.5 million in punitive damages, for a total of $241 million. Plaintiff’s attorney Patrick A. Salvi II said afterward that “despite fully understanding the dangers of transporting dry ice in a subcompact vehicle, Prairie Farms Dairy never ensured training, written protocols, or that any warnings would go to Mr. Johnson regarding the serious risks involved.”⁸

What the Verdict Did to Prairie Farms

The verdict landed hard on Prairie Farms, a dairy cooperative owned by more than 500 farm families with roughly 7,000 employees and annual sales above $4.69 billion.⁹ The company’s general counsel wrote in a March 2026 email later filed in court that Prairie Farms’ bank accounts had been frozen by court order, that it was “judicially restrained from conducting ordinary financial operations,” and that customers had been told not to send payments owed to the co-op. Under those conditions, counsel warned, the company could survive only “a limited number of additional business days.”²

With Illinois prejudgment interest, Prairie Farms projected the judgment would grow past $380 million. Appealing it would have required an appeal bond of roughly $570 million, which the company’s counsel described as potentially “unattainable.”¹⁰

The $2 Billion Bad Faith Suit Against Travelers

Instead of trying to pay the judgment outright, Prairie Farms reached a post-verdict settlement with the Johnson family that assigned the cooperative’s legal claims against its insurer, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, to Paula Johnson. Illinois law permits an insured company to transfer a claim for wrongful failure to settle to a plaintiff who has won an excess judgment against it.¹¹

On March 31, 2026, Johnson, acting as Prairie Farms’ assignee, sued Travelers in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, Case No. 3:26-cv-00384, seeking more than $2 billion in compensatory and punitive damages.² The complaint alleges that over ten years Travelers repeatedly refused Prairie Farms’ requests to settle the underlying case within policy limits, and that the insurer’s refusal to tender its limits kept excess carriers from contributing, leaving Prairie Farms exposed to the full $241 million.¹²

Travelers filed its answer and affirmative defenses on April 22, 2026. The case is before Judge J. Phil Gilbert, with a jury trial set for June 28, 2027.¹³

1
Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard. Prairie Farms Dairy Verdict Dry Ice
2
PropertyCasualty360. Travelers Hit With $2B Bad Faith Lawsuit
3
RiverBender.com. Jury Awards $241 Million for Fatal Dry Ice Transport Incident
4
The Telegraph. Man’s Estate Sues Edwardsville Company After Death
5
First Alert 4. Jury Orders Prairie Farms Dairy Inc to Pay $241M for Family of Man Who Died in 2016
6
Fox 2 Now. Family Awarded $241 Million in Prairie Farms Dry Ice Death Case
7
OSHA. Standard 1910.1200 – Hazard Communication
8
The Southern Illinoisan. Jury Awards $241 Million in Trial Against Dairy Company for Tragic Dry Ice Death
9
Prairie Farms. The Prairie Farms Family of Companies Responds to the Signing of the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act
10
Black Chronicle. After $241M Verdict vs Prairie Farms, Travelers Sued for $2B for Bad Faith
11
RiverBender.com. Travelers Hit With $2 Billion Bad Faith Lawsuit After $241 Million Wrongful Death Verdict
12
Law360. Travelers Unit Hit With Bad Faith Suit Over $241M Jury Verdict
13
PACER Monitor. Johnson v. Travelers Property Casualty Company of America