Philadelphia jury awards former mechanic $725.5M in Exxon Mobil case

A Philadelphia jury sided against Exxon Mobil Corp. and awarded $725.5 million on Thursday to a former Pennsylvania man who contended he suffered from leukemia due to benzene exposure during his work starting in the 1970s as an auto mechanic and gas station attendant.

The award in Common Pleas Court was sizable for a suit filed by a single plaintiff not part of a class-action suit.

“The jury recognized that it was a wrong thing for Mobil Oil to knowingly have what they knew to cause cancer in a product that people had to use in the workplace, in their vehicles, and just in their daily lives and not tell the public,” said Andrew DuPont, attorney for Paul and Diane Gill, who filed suit against Texas-based Exxon Mobil in 2020.

Exxon Mobil said it would appeal the verdict.

“This is an irrational verdict that we will ask the court to reverse before it becomes final,” the company said in a statement e-mailed to The Inquirer. “Beyond that request, we plan to exhaust all available appeals and are confident an appellate court will see the verdict for what it is. We are reviewing our next steps.”

DuPont, an attorney with Philadelphia-based Locks Law Firm, said Paul Gill’s work exposed him to benzene-containing products such as solvents, degreasers, oils, and gasoline.

According to the suit, Gill worked at an ARCO station in Painted Post, N.Y., in 1974; an auto garage in Hamilton Valley, Pa., from 1975 to 1980; and at a dairy farm in Lindley, N.Y., from 1986 to 1994. Those jobs took place before Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.

The suit said Gill worked directly and indirectly on a near daily basis with those products, exposing him to benzene, xylene, toluene, and other chemical compounds.

Gill, now 67, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in 2019. He suffered multiple symptoms and side effects as the result of the AML and treatments. The suit said the cancer was the “proximate result of his exposure to the defendants’ benzene-containing products and the defendants’ wrongful conduct.”

AML starts in the bone marrow and often quickly moves into the blood, according to the American Cancer Society. It can spread to other parts of the body including the lymph nodes, liver, spleen, central nervous system, and testicles.

The suit said that benzene had been known to cause cancer before 1964 and that there is no safe level of exposure. It accused Exxon Mobil of gross negligence, saying the company knew, or should have known, that people working with or in close proximity to benzene-related products could suffer from “blood and bone marrow poisoning and damage, damage to DNA, chromosome damage, cancer, leukemia, and other blood and bone marrow disease and damage.”

The suit also said that Gill did not know the “nature and extent of danger” he had exposed himself to over decades working as a mechanic or at service stations. But, it said, Exxon Mobil was aware and continued to make, market, and sell products with benzene without warning people who used those products, or put controls in place. Benzene-containing products should have come with warnings, instructions, and training, the suit said.

Gill’s illness “caused him pain, suffering, disability, disfigurement, deformity, impairment, mental anguish, anxiety, humiliation, and increased susceptibility to infection,” the suit said, preventing him “from engaging in those activities from which he derives life’s pleasures.”

Gill’s wife, Diane, was awarded $500,000.

Other attorneys representing Gill during the trial included Patrick Wigle and Rajeev Mittal of Dallas-based Waters Kraus Paul & Siegel.

In a similar case in Connecticut last year, a jury reached the opposite conclusion and ruled in favor of Exxon Mobil in a lawsuit brought by a widow who sought $40 million for her husband’s injuries and eventual death from AML, according to the Hartford Business Journal. The husband, Nicholas Yoranidis, owned an Exxon Mobil gas station. Jurors there found his widow had failed to prove the products were defective or establish a connection to Nicholas Yoranidis’ condition.