A wheelchair-bound man who sued the New York City Transit Authority after construction workers dropped a railroad tie on him — paralyzing him from the waist down — was awarded $110 million Tuesday by a Brooklyn jury.
The mind-blowing $110,174,972.38 sum came following a three-week trial in which Robert Liciaga testified he was biking along Broadway in Bushwick, underneath the elevated J and M line, when a worker waived him through the construction site.
“He basically biked straight ahead and he has no memory after that,” his attorney Scott Occhiogrosso told The Post. “His next memory is waking up in the hospital.”
Liciaga, now 26, wasn’t in the courtroom to hear the Tuesday afternoon verdict, as he’d been escorted back to the nursing facility where he now lives full-time.
But Occhiogrosso, who tried the case alongside his partner Daniel O’Toole, said he called Liciaga right away.
“I knew God was with us today,” the lawyer said his client responded, noting that Wednesday is the three-year anniversary of the tragedy.
Court documents accused the NYC Transit Authority of performing subway maintenance without barricades, and failing to assign pedestrians to stay away from the area. As they worked that day in 2016, a supervisor allegedly had two workers drag a 10-foot railroad tie to the edge of the girder and drop it off the side. The beam landed on Liciaga and fractured his spine.
While the verdict will bring Liciaga some relief, Occhiogrosso said his client’s injuries are permanent.
“He was healthy strong, 23-year-old kid. He road a bicycle on a regular basis, and played basketball,” the attorney said. “There’s a really tragic degree of permanence to his injuries. The extent to which he can experience healing in on spiritual, not a physical level.”
Occhiogrosso said attorneys for the NYC Transit Authority tried to argue that his client should have known better than to enter the construction site.
MTA Chief External Affairs Officer Maxwell Young told The Post that the jury award was absurdly large.
“This verdict is grossly excessive and we intend to pursue all avenues of appeal, in addition to asking the trial court to reduce the award,” he said in a statement.