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A Fresno jury on Thursday awarded $7.2 million in damages in a wrongful-death civil trial in which the plaintiff was a woman who survived the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping, but lost her husband in another bus-related tragedy decades later.
Sheryll Haen, 42, and her family sued two big-rig companies in Fresno County Superior Court when her husband, John, was killed in a April 2009 traffic accident while volunteering to drive a church bus.
The two bus incidents might not seem related, but during the monthlong trial, Haen, of Coarsegold, recalled on the witness stand her harrowing childhood experiences when she was 7 years old and how it left her terrified of buses.
That testimony was important, her attorney said, because her husband painstakingly helped her get over this fear, going so far as to get a bus-driver license so that she would feel comfortable enough to get on a bus again with him.
For him to die in a bus-related accident made the suffering that much worse for Haen, said Roger Dreyer, who represented the Haen family.
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