Karen Koehler

“It’s September 24, 2015, and I’d like you to join us on a duck ride,” Karen Koehler told a King County jury on October 16, 2018. She said it wearing a captain’s hat, with a duck whistle. Koehler, senior managing partner of Stritmatter Law in Seattle, represented people injured, and the families of people killed, when an amphibious tour vehicle called DUCK 6 crossed the center line of the Aurora Bridge and struck a charter bus carrying international students from North Seattle College. For much of her opening statement she spoke as a duck captain. “I love my job. I like being a captain,” she said. “They’ve trained us how to do our job and told us how to do it.”

Then the captain turned to what she did not know. “Here’s what I don’t know, and this is a little troubling to me,” Koehler said. “I don’t know that Ride the Ducks Seattle is understaffed in their maintenance department,” she went on, or that “the head of maintenance has repeatedly told management that they need more mechanics.” The captain added: “These are very old ducks.” Of the company that built the vehicles, Ride the Ducks International of Branson, Missouri, she said: “It will admit it was a manufacturer, but it wasn’t registered with our safety administration.” And when there was a problem, she told the jurors, it would not do a recall. Through the opening she took the hat off and put it back on, moving between the captain’s voice and her own. In February 2019 the jury returned verdicts totaling $123 million against both companies.

Duck 6 on the Aurora Bridge

Shortly after 11 a.m. on September 24, 2015, DUCK 6 was northbound on the Aurora Bridge with 36 passengers and its driver, Eric Bishop, on the way to its launch point on north Lake Union. Bishop heard a loud clunk from the left front axle. The vehicle drifted right and then veered left, and the brakes did not slow it; at trial Bishop testified that “The steering wheel was like jelly.” DUCK 6 crossed three lanes into oncoming traffic and struck the front of a southbound Bellair Charters motorcoach carrying international students and staff from North Seattle College on a morning tour of the city. The coach’s driver, Don Clouse, later testified that he saw the duck cross the center line and could not avoid being hit. Eleven duck passengers were thrown from the vehicle. Five people on the coach died: Claudia Derschmidt, 49, of Austria, who had come to visit her son at the college; Privando Putradanto, 18, of Indonesia; Runjie Song of China; Mami Sato, 36, of Japan; and HaRam Kim, 20, of South Korea, who died three days later.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that the left front axle housing of DUCK 6 had fractured, and that the probable cause of the crash was the mechanical failure of that axle housing, due to improper manufacturing by Ride the Ducks International, the Branson, Missouri, company that built the vehicle, and inadequate maintenance by the Seattle operator. The manufacturer told federal investigators about front axle housing fractures on its stretch vehicles in 2003 and 2004. It began welding a reinforcing tab onto vehicles built after the fall of 2004, DUCK 6 among them, without issuing a bulletin about the change. In 2013 two more left front axle housings fractured in Branson, one of them on a vehicle with the tab. In October 2013 the manufacturer issued Service Bulletin SB-00-14-13, which recommended welding a collar of two reinforcing metal half pipes to the tapered section of the front axle housing. None of the Seattle company’s stretch vehicles had that repair, and it had completed the work called for in 15 of the manufacturer’s 74 bulletins.

Ride the Ducks International had never registered with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as a motor vehicle manufacturer, although the agency’s Office of Chief Counsel had determined that it was one. Among the safety issues in the crash, the NTSB listed the “Failure by an unregistered vehicle manufacturer to properly remedy a defective safety-related motor vehicle part under the federal recall process.” After the crash, Washington’s Utilities and Transportation Commission suspended the Seattle company’s 20 tour vehicles and found 463 safety violations; the company admitted 159 critical violations and 304 record-keeping violations and paid $222,000 in penalties.

Forty-Four Plaintiffs in One Courtroom

Koehler was lead trial counsel for 44 plaintiffs from around the world, including three of the death cases that went to trial, with Andrew Ackley as second chair; co-counsel for members of the group left the trial presentation to her. Her group included the families of Claudia Derschmidt, Privando Putradanto and HaRam Kim, and Clouse, the coach driver. The trial in King County Superior Court, before Judge Catherine Shaffer, ran from October 1, 2018, to February 7, 2019. The court denied the defense requests to bifurcate the trial, and all 44 plaintiffs were tried together, with liability and damages heard at once. Plaintiffs traveled from across the country and from abroad, often with interpreters, and some testified by Skype; roughly one plaintiff’s story went before the jury each day.

The first name in the caption, Dinh v. Ride the Ducks, belonged to Phuong Dinh, an 18-year-old from Vietnam in her first year at North Seattle College. The crash broke her leg badly, broke her arm, and cut her face. In early December 2015 she was still recovering in a Seattle nursing facility and worried that her health insurance would lapse because she could no longer stay enrolled at the college. Her father had taken leave from his construction business to care for her, and her mother had gone back to Vietnam to look after her siblings. She said she had not heard from Ride the Ducks.

Over four months the jury heard almost 90 witnesses and more than two dozen experts. The jurors viewed the vehicles off-site, watched video from the motorcoach’s onboard camera, heard a recorded police interview, and saw hundreds of photographs, life-size body boards, charts, and a slide show for each witness. Koehler limited how often the jurors saw the crash video; she has said that “the worst thing you can do is to show it over and over and over and over again.” She planned the order of witnesses like a film production: “I’m a Hollywood producer, or director, so we grid out what we want to do.”

Jack Snyder, the lawyer for Ride the Ducks International, maintained that the company had identified the problem before the crash and alerted other operators, and that every licensee and franchisee except Seattle had made the fix. His client, he told the jury, “was not a proximate cause of this accident.” Patricia Buchanan, for Ride the Ducks of Seattle, answered that the manufacturer had known of earlier axle fractures, beginning in Branson, and bore responsibility for the defect. Each company blamed the other, and both asked the jurors to weigh each plaintiff’s injuries one at a time. Koehler contended that the manufacturer had failed to notify federal authorities when it discovered cracks in the axles. “Up until trial neither of the Ducks defendants would admit that they had any role in causing the disaster,” she said afterward. Four plaintiffs settled during trial. For the 40 claims that remained, the companies’ last offer was a high-low agreement: no less than $15 million and no more than $30 million, whatever the jury decided.

Forty Names in Closing

Koehler gave her closing on January 25, 2019. She built it around the chances there had been to prevent the crash, a list of if-onlys, taking the theme from Cher’s song “If I Could Turn Back Time” and running a timeline in reverse, with video played backward. After four months of testimony she did not walk the jurors back through it. “You don’t want to regurgitate the same testimony,” she said later. “I need to get something that they won’t be able to get out of their minds.” To the jury she said: “We don’t know why they ignored the things they did, we don’t know why they missed the things they could have fixed.”

In closing, Koehler named each of her 40 clients, described their injuries and what had been taken from them, and asked the jury to award each of them $3 million or more. “There’s too much fault here, there’s too much disaster here, there’s too much death and injury here,” she said. She told the jurors: “Fight for them.”

The jury began deliberating on January 28. On February 7 it assigned 67 to 70 percent of the fault to Ride the Ducks International and 30 to 33 percent to Ride the Ducks of Seattle, and awarded $10 million in special damages, $110 million in general damages, and $3.5 million for the net loss to the estate. Reading the verdict aloud took more than half an hour, Koehler recalled years later. Phuong Dinh, who was 18 and a freshman at North Seattle College at the time of the crash and had to have her left hip replaced, was awarded more than $25 million. “The defense position was that people that didn’t have broken bones were fine and the jury said no they weren’t,” Koehler said after the verdict. She called the verdict “an acknowledgment by our community – that each and every plaintiff has been terribly wronged and harmed.”

Judge Shaffer denied the companies’ requests for a new trial. The companies filed notices of appeal in March 2019 and had to post bonds totaling $133,819,060.67 to cover the verdict. In April 2019 they dropped their appeal in Dinh v. Ride the Ducks, and the claims of five more plaintiffs settled for another $5.8 million. Koehler’s team had intended “to fight the appeal all the way,” she said, and her clients cried with relief at the news. They would live with their scars and trauma forever, she said, but no longer had to wait years for an appeal to end: “They can at least shut the lawsuit door.”

A Slow Turn on 134th Avenue East

Kelly Holguin testified that she did not see the motorcycle. On February 27, 2020, she stopped her mid-size SUV at an uncontrolled intersection in Pierce County, Washington, with her left signal on, and waited about 45 seconds because three women with strollers stood at the corner and she thought they might try to cross. She estimated that she glanced at the women for five seconds, looked for oncoming traffic for ten, looked back at the women for five, and then began what she called a “slow turn” from 134th Avenue East onto 164th Street East. Braeden Simon, a 26-year-old EMT who hoped to become a firefighter, was riding his motorcycle south on 134th. Her SUV and his motorcycle collided. Simon flew through the air, broke a street signpost, and landed on the grass beyond it.

Simon worked as an EMT and emergency-room technician at Valley Medical Center. He had trained to become a firefighter, had served as a volunteer, and was applying to fire departments around the state. The crash left him with life-threatening multiple trauma, several serious orthopedic injuries, and a nerve injury in his right leg. Early in his recovery there were questions about whether he would walk again. He was determined to walk out of the hospital under his own power, and he did.

Holguin’s defense was that Simon had been going too fast to be seen. The speed limit on 134th was 40 miles per hour. A witness named Crowley, who did not see the collision itself, testified that he observed two motorcycles “screaming” along at 80 to 90 miles per hour; another witness, Walker, who also did not see the crash, said they were going faster than 40, possibly 50, 60, or even 70. Pierce County Sheriff’s Deputy James Cowan, who investigated, reported that the motorcycles were likely traveling “a bit over the speed limit,” possibly 50 to 55 miles per hour, and concluded that Holguin’s failure to yield was the primary cause of the crash.

Koehler was Simon’s lead trial lawyer, with Lisa Benedetti as second chair and Shannon Kilpatrick responsible for trial briefing. By the time trial began in Pierce County Superior Court on September 13, 2022, the court had already ruled Holguin negligent as a matter of law. On October 21, 2022, the jury returned its verdict: just over $44.7 million in damages, with 95 percent of the fault assigned to Holguin and 5 percent to Simon. Division One of the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed on June 16, 2025, and on January 7, 2026, the Washington Supreme Court denied Holguin’s petition for review.

Seventeen Seconds in View

Simon’s lawyers moved for partial summary judgment on November 5, 2021, relying primarily on a report by Harbinson, a former traffic detective with advanced training in collision investigation and reconstruction. Harbinson determined that Simon was traveling 41 to 43 miles per hour at impact and calculated that Holguin had more than 1,150 feet of clear sightline down 134th in the direction Simon was coming from. At that speed Simon would have been in her view for about 17.4 to 18.2 seconds before the collision. By Harbinson’s calculations he would have been visible for about 13.2 seconds even at 60 miles per hour and for at least 10 seconds at 80, and once Holguin entered his lane, Simon had less than 1.7 seconds to perceive her as a hazard.

Washington law treats the left-turning driver as the disfavored driver. RCW 46.61.185 requires a driver turning left at an intersection to yield to any vehicle approaching from the opposite direction that is within the intersection or so close to it as to constitute an immediate hazard. On December 8, 2021, the trial court ruled that Holguin was negligent as a matter of law because, as the disfavored left-turning driver, she failed to see the oncoming vehicle. Defending the ruling on appeal, Simon relied on Owens v. Kuro, 56 Wn.2d 564, for the rule that a left-turning driver who collides with an oncoming vehicle that was there to be seen can be found negligent as a matter of law without regard to the oncoming driver’s negligence. The turning driver in Owens had a duty to watch oncoming traffic and an unobstructed view, yet did not see the approaching vehicle until the collision, and the Washington Supreme Court emphasized that the oncoming driver’s alleged contributory negligence did not negate the turning driver’s negligence in turning directly into its path.

Holguin had opposed summary judgment with her own testimony and with lay witnesses who had not seen the collision. Division One held that she had produced no evidence creating a question of material fact about whether Simon was there to be seen. The court pointed to Harbinson’s report, which Holguin had not challenged and which placed Simon within her field of vision, and noted that the eyewitnesses had not testified that his speed was reckless. The court distinguished Bordynoski v. Bergner, 97 Wn.2d 335, in which both the defendant’s speed and a bicyclist’s awareness had been in dispute.

Douglas Fir and an Arborist

Holguin’s new speed evidence centered on the signpost. Two weeks after the discovery cutoff, she disclosed two new experts. Patrick Riedlinger, an accident reconstructionist, applied a projectile equation from classical physics and concluded that Simon would have had to be traveling at least 67 miles per hour to fly over the pedestrians’ heads and strike the top of the post. Tencer, a biomechanical engineer, used the ultimate tensile strength of Douglas fir to claim that Simon lost 30.4 miles per hour when he hit it.

Andrew Ackley took the defense experts’ last-minute depositions, and Simon’s lawyers answered them. On August 30, 2022, two weeks before trial, they disclosed three experts of their own: Kevin Rider, a human-factors expert, on Holguin’s capacity to perceive and react to Simon; Mark Olson, on the damage to Simon’s motorcycle and Holguin’s SUV; and Favero Greenforest, an arborist, on what kind of wood the signpost was made of and how much rot it had. Holguin moved the next day to strike them. She then retracted that request and asked instead for a 90-day continuance, her lawyer arguing that fairness under the Burnet factors required at least that much delay.

On September 12, the day before trial, the court denied the continuance. It found that Simon’s late disclosure was not willful or deliberate because, as Kilpatrick had argued, it responded to what Simon’s team learned from deposing the defense experts and reading their reports. “Trials are often of this nature,” the court said. “They can change quickly, and that’s not unusual.” To limit prejudice, it let Holguin depose the new experts on court recess days before opening statements and confined all three to rebuttal. It also weighed what a delay would cost Simon: “This case has been pending for a long time, and he has severe injuries.” Division One held that the denial was within the trial court’s discretion.

Holguin tried again after her experts testified. On October 13 she moved for a directed verdict and for reconsideration of the liability ruling, and on October 17 the court denied both motions. “The evidence cited does relate to the driving of Mr. Simon,” the court said, “but it doesn’t relate to the Defendant’s actions so much in that she still was the disfavored driver who took a left turn.” Her testimony, it added, was still that she did not see him. Division One found no abuse of discretion in the refusal to reconsider.

Two Million Dollars and Four More Surgeries

The verdict included $2 million for past medical expenses. Simon contended that the evidence showed $1,512,527.91 in medical expenses through mid-May 2022, four months before trial. After that he had multiple emergency-department visits, multi-day hospitalizations, four surgeries including the removal and replacement of hardware, a bone biopsy, imaging, and repeated wound care. Holguin moved for remittitur, arguing that the award exceeded the expenses in evidence, and the trial court denied the motion. On appeal, Simon argued that the jury could reasonably extrapolate the cost of the later treatment from the cost of the earlier treatment. Division One, noting that damages need not be calculated with mathematical exactness and applying the “strong presumption in favor of the jury’s verdict,” held that the trial court had not abused its discretion in refusing to reduce the award.

Division One disposed of Holguin’s remaining claims on preservation and briefing grounds. She had proposed one of the jury instructions she challenged and expressly agreed to another, and her objections to two more had not raised the argument she made on appeal; her new-trial claim lacked the reasoned argument needed to merit review. Benedetti and Kilpatrick handled the appeal, and David Zimmer assisted with the briefing in the Supreme Court, where a unanimous panel led by Chief Justice Stephens denied review. “I will always remember how pleased the jury was after they gave that big verdict,” Koehler said when the appeal ended. “They were so proud of their work.”

Office Instead of House

Koehler was born in 1960. Her mother, Mary Fung, was a chemical engineer who later became a lawyer; Fung’s clients often paid her by letting the family eat in their restaurants, one painted the house, and another repaired the cars, “not always especially well.” Her father, James Klaus Koehler, was a professor of biological structure who typically made dinner and then graded medical students’ papers while the children watched television. “By the eighth grade I knew my destiny was to be a lawyer,” she has written. She graduated from the University of Washington in 1982 and received her law degree in 1985.

She practiced part time until her daughter Noelle entered kindergarten, and seven years later she became president of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association, now the Washington State Association for Justice. Her daughters played “office” instead of “house,” watched trials, and visited judges in their chambers. She has written on automobile injury litigation for Thomson West, and Trial Guides publishes her book Preparing for Depositions along with recorded programs of hers on lay witnesses, defense medical examinations, and establishing vicarious liability against Amazon, Uber, and other e-commerce companies. She has taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Law, and from 2010 to 2017 she ran the Spinal Cord Injury Association of Washington, which she founded, as its executive director. In the mid-2000s, she has written, an opponent told her that defense lawyers were calling her the Velvet Hammer; asked why, he said, “because you smile so sweetly while you are hammering us into the ground.”

In January 2024 the City of Seattle agreed to pay $10 million to settle the claims of more than 50 people who said they were injured while protesting police violence in 2020, among them Aubreanna Inda, who went into cardiac arrest after a Seattle police blast ball hit her in the chest. The case had been set for a three-month trial beginning in May 2024, and a federal judge had already sanctioned the city for officials’ intentional deletion of text messages about the protests. Koehler, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, said her clients had agreed to divide the money in proportion to each person’s injuries, and she called the payment “an acknowledgement that [the city] kind of screwed up.”

In October 2025, in Trial News, the Washington State Association for Justice’s journal, she wrote about the demand letter she drafted in The Estate of RB v. Amazon.com, Inc. and about what artificial intelligence means for trial lawyers who tell human stories. She and her partner Mo Hamoudi host The Velvet Hammer Podcast on trial work; in an August 2026 episode she said that “the number one emotion that always is with me when I hear a jury verdict is relief.” In May 2026 she began publishing a memoir, The Trials and Tribulations of the Velvet Hammer, on Substack.

Licensed in 1976

In 1976 the Department of Social and Health Services licensed a man as a foster parent. He had earlier been arrested for luring two boys, ages 13 and 14, into his apartment and sexually abusing them, and had pleaded guilty. Greg H. was 13 when his mother, unable to care for him, had him removed from her home, and DSHS placed him with the family, who were then living in a “tiny red house.” There was no bedroom for him. He lived in an unfinished attic that was never inspected, then slept on a couch, where the sexual abuse began in earnest, and later in an unfinished basement. For three and a half years the foster father sexually assaulted him multiple times a week.

Marty M. was 11 when his mother died in front of him. DSHS moved him at least seven times, and he was held back a year in school, before it placed him with the same foster father at 13. In 1981 Greg ran away and was taken in by his high school girlfriend’s parents; he told them about the abuse, and they became foster parents so that he could stay with them until he finished school. Marty was not removed from the home, and the abuse continued until one of the children from church asked him what was going on and he told. The foster father was then arrested and pleaded guilty. He served one day in jail and was fined $500.

Both boys went on to serve honorably in the military. Greg became a mechanic and owns his own vehicle-repair business; Marty became a schoolteacher and works in his wife’s day care. Neither was ever arrested. Neither told his wife or children the details of what had happened, and neither received treatment. Greg dealt with it by “stuffing everything into a black bag and throwing it away.”

In 2023 Greg wondered whether the foster father was still alive, searched online, and found that he was a level 3 sex offender with a long line of sexual assault convictions. Greg obtained the police report from the 1981 case and found that his own abuse was never mentioned in it. When he asked the State for its records, the agency, by then the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, told him that none existed. He contacted Koehler, who investigated and sued the State for negligence. She learned that in the early 2000s the foster father had been the subject of a lawsuit against a Salvation Army swim program, where a supervisor had grown suspicious and worried after he took pictures of boys in the shower room, and had called around town and collected a dossier of complaints about his conduct with other boys.

Caseworkers had visited Greg a few times in his first year in the home; after that, six months to a year passed between visits, and he was never interviewed outside the foster parents’ presence. DSHS did not interview Greg, then 16, before placing Marty in the home to make sure it was safe. After Marty’s disclosure, DSHS placed him with a friend of the foster father’s who attended the same church and worked at the same real estate office. That man arranged a meeting at the church with the first foster father and the minister, who demanded that Marty apologize for what the minister called false allegations. DSHS gave neither boy medical or psychological treatment. Its manual said that the files in such a case should never be destroyed; the State destroyed them.

The State answered that the claims were barred by the statute of limitations and that Greg and Marty were at fault and had failed to mitigate their damages. At trial the State argued that the foster father alone was to blame and that the State had not been negligent, and it asked the jury for a defense verdict.

For abuse committed before June 6, 2024, Washington’s limitations statute for childhood sexual abuse claims, RCW 4.16.340, allows three years from the latest of the abuse itself, the time the victim discovered or reasonably should have discovered that the injury was caused by the abuse, and the time the victim discovered that the abuse caused the injury for which the claim is brought. When the Legislature amended the statute in 1991, it found that a victim “may be unable to understand or make the connection between childhood sexual abuse and emotional harm or damage until many years after the abuse occurs.”

Fifty Years Back in Time

Koehler tried the case with Mo Hamoudi and Darcy Covert in May 2026. After jury selection, she wrote, the jurors took the abuse as established; what struck all of them was how old the case was, a concern she rendered as “How can we sit in judgment on a situation where we weren’t even born yet.” The jury needed to see, she concluded, that what had happened 50 years earlier was so fundamentally wrong that time made no difference in the outcome. “It was wrong then,” she wrote. “It is wrong now.” Over the weekend she compiled a time capsule for her opening statement.

On Monday morning she arranged two camping tables and a wooden captain’s chair, pulled a paisley dress on over her shirt and slacks, set up a manual typewriter she could not get out of its steel box, and propped a wall-mount telephone on a file of old high school papers. She skipped the customary good morning to the judge, counsel and jury and was in character from the first moment. As she set the scene, she told the jurors that Jimmy Carter was president and the Vietnam War had ended, that Jaws was a box-office success, and that Microsoft had filed its corporate papers in New Mexico. Then, acting out what she called “taking every step necessary not to license a bad man,” she dialed the phone and held one-way conversations, typed memos to the file, and read from Manual G, which sat in an orange folder her father had used to keep her grade-school papers.

The jury returned a unanimous verdict on May 28, 2026. It found that the State had acted negligently and that the statute of limitations did not bar the claims, set the total damages at $18,250,000, and held the State responsible for $5,875,000, attributing the rest to the foster father’s intentional acts. Afterward, Koehler wrote, the jurors asked whether she had been a professional actor. At first, they told her, they had wondered what was going on. “But that feeling didn’t last long before we were right back in time with you.”