Colleen Durkin Peterson

PCB Exposure at Sky Valley

The Sky Valley litigation examined PCB contamination from aging fluorescent-light fixtures and the resulting exposures reported by former students and staff.

A Building Full of Dust

Sky Valley Education Center occupied an aging school building in Monroe, Washington. Its fluorescent light fixtures contained polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals prized for stability and heat resistance when Monsanto manufactured them. As fixtures failed and materials aged, PCBs escaped into dust and air shared by children, teachers, a librarian and a custodian.

The exposure belonged to ordinary school time. Students sat beneath the lights, changed rooms, ate lunch and returned the next morning. Teachers remained for years. A custodian worked inside the dust that settled after everyone else went home. Illness appeared later in different forms—cancers, endocrine disruption, neurological injury and problems with memory and concentration.

Peterson joined the trial team. Chemical testing had to establish what occupied the building. Physicians had to explain what happened inside each plaintiff. Corporate documents had to establish what Monsanto knew over decades about products still installed above school desks long after PCB manufacture ended.

In July 2023, Peterson and Richard Friedman led a trial for two former Sky Valley students. The King County jury found Monsanto liable for supplying an unsafe product without adequate warnings and awarded $72 million, including $60 million in punitive damages. The classroom itself became the route of exposure.

Nine Weeks

Four months later, Peterson returned to trial with seven former employees: five teachers, a librarian and a custodian. Two had developed rare cancers. Others described injuries affecting cognition, hormones and neurological function.

The trial lasted nine weeks. Jurors then deliberated for two more. The chronology stretched from the design and sale of PCB mixtures to the years those chemicals remained in old light fixtures, through Monsanto’s scientific knowledge and into the individual medical histories at counsel table.

Common evidence could establish the product and its behavior. The common proof had to accommodate seven different lives, each with a distinct room, duration of work, symptoms, and diagnosis. Peterson had to keep each biography intact while returning the jury to the same lights overhead.

In November 2023, the jury awarded the seven plaintiffs $165 million, including $115.3 million in punitive damages.

The Statue on the Porch

Peterson learned the meaning of plaintiff practice at her family’s front door. Her father, John Durkin, represented injured people. One day, after he had lost a case, a couple arrived with their two children and a lawn statue of Saint Francis. They thanked him for listening to them and for fighting. The family had received no verdict to celebrate. They came because the way he had carried their case still mattered.

As a child, Peterson misheard her father’s profession and announced that she wanted to be a “girl warrior.” The phrase remained part of the family’s account of how she came to plaintiff-side trial work.

She grew up Asian and Irish in Washington in a trial-lawyer family. Legal work was part of family life as well as office life. Her father taught her to know the client, tell the truth and move the ball. The standard measured attention and forward work through outcomes no lawyer could guarantee.

Peterson earned her law degree at Gonzaga and entered medical-malpractice practice two years later. Medicine gave her a language for the injuries that would later fill the Sky Valley trials. By the time she joined Friedman Rubin in 2022, she could work across occupational medicine, neurology, neuroradiology and the clinical histories required to connect a persistent chemical with a changing human body.

A Chemical Designed to Stay

PCBs were commercially useful because they lasted. They resisted heat and broke down slowly inside electrical equipment. Those same traits kept them in the school long after the company stopped selling them, the fixtures aged, and the buildings changed owners.

At Sky Valley, aging fixtures leaked and emitted PCBs into occupied rooms. Dust gave the chemical transport. Air gave it reach. The building remained an active source of exposure.

The proof crossed disciplines. Environmental sampling located PCB mixtures in the school. Industrial hygiene addressed how they circulated. Toxicology and epidemiology supplied biological context. Neurologists, endocrinologists, and cancer specialists addressed individual injury. Internal documents established what Monsanto learned and when. Peterson coordinated that evidence for each plaintiff.

The litigation also confronted the law of time. Product-liability statutes often measure from manufacture or sale. The Sky Valley chemicals remained capable of exposure decades later. In October 2025, the Washington Supreme Court restored a $185 million verdict for three teachers after holding that Missouri law governed the relevant liability questions. The decisive corporate conduct—PCB design, knowledge and warning decisions—had occurred at Monsanto’s home in Missouri. The court also preserved the punitive damages.

The ruling governed other appealed judgments from the same school and confirmed that a manufacturer did not gain immunity merely because the PCBs remained in the building long enough for another state’s limitation period to expire.

Two Hundred Lives

More than two hundred students, employees and family members eventually brought claims connected to Sky Valley. Their conditions and exposure periods varied. The repeated trials established a common history broad enough to serve many cases while requiring each jury to hear particular lives.

In one later trial, a jury returned an $857 million verdict for former students and school volunteers. The trial court applied the governing punitive-damages limit and entered a judgment of approximately $438 million. Another jury awarded $100 million to four plaintiffs in January 2025. The figures marked successive groups of people who had occupied the same building under the same fixtures.

In 2025, Bayer announced agreements in principle resolving claims by more than two hundred Sky Valley plaintiffs on confidential terms, apart from cases already moving through appeal. The agreements came only after juries heard years of corporate history, school testing, and medical evidence in open court. By then, the air inside one public school had produced one of the most consequential PCB litigations in the country.

Three Records Before One Jury

Peterson’s trials required three records to remain aligned. The corporate record addressed Monsanto’s knowledge, product design, and warnings. The building record showed which fixtures remained, how PCBs escaped, and where they were measured. The medical record belonged to a particular student or employee, with years in specific rooms and a distinct diagnosis.

Repeated trials made the common evidence more exact without making the plaintiffs interchangeable. Each jury could hear the history of the same manufacturer and school, then had to decide exposure, causation, and damages person by person. That is the discipline of a mass-exposure trial: efficiency in the shared record and individuality in the verdict form.

The Porch and the Classroom

The Saint Francis statue on her family’s porch supplied Peterson with an early measure of representation that did not depend entirely on winning. Sky Valley later demanded both forms of accountability: the care required to carry individual clients through years of illness and the technical command required to try a chemical case through verdict and appeal.

Her work at Sky Valley joined those scales. The fixtures were ordinary objects hanging above desks; the litigation required environmental chemistry, industrial hygiene, medicine, corporate history, and choice-of-law analysis. Peterson kept that complexity attached to the people who occupied the rooms.