*The Los Angeles Rams must pay former NFL running back Reggie Bush $12.45 million in damages for a knee injury he suffered in St. Louis in 2015, a jury decided on Tuesday (June 12).
Bush, then playing for the San Francisco 49ers, ran out of bounds on a punt return in a game at the Edward Jones Dome on Nov. 1, 2015, and slipped on some concrete. He suffered a torn lateral meniscus, which ended his season.
The St. Louis jury ordered the Rams to pay Bush $4.95 million in compensatory damages and $7.5 million in punitive damages.
“I’m very happy with the verdict,” Bush told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The people spoke and decided very fairly.”
Attorneys for the Rams said they plan to file a motion for a new trial. The team declined comment on the verdict.
Bush filed suit in 2016, alleging that the Rams and the public stadium authorities allowed a “a dangerous condition to exist at the Dome.” Bush’s suit called the area where he fell “a concrete ring of death.”
Watch below:
A week before Bush suffered his injury, Cleveland Browns quarterback Josh McCown had been hurt on the same slab of concrete, sliding across it and into a wall and injuring his shoulder.
Bush’s original suit was against the St. Louis Rams, St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission. But on Friday, Associate Circuit Judge Calea Stovall-Reid dismissed the convention authority and sports complex, leaving the Rams as the sole defendant.
The Rams moved out of St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2016.
Bush signed a one-year deal with the Buffalo Bills in 2016 but finished with 12 carries for minus-3 yards, seven catches for 90 yards and one touchdown. That was the last year of his 11-year NFL career. He argued that he would have signed a bigger contract if not for the injury.
Bush, 33, is currently employed as an analyst for the NFL Network.
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