Patrick A. Salvi II

On September 8, 2022, Sue Kamuda took the witness stand at the Daley Center in Chicago and told a Cook County jury about the day in 1985 when she and her husband, Skip, bought their house in Willowbrook. It was, she said, “the happiest day of my life.” She was 70. She had worked as director of buildings and grounds for a west suburban school district, and she and Skip raised three children in the house. She told the jurors how much of her life there had been spent outdoors: gardening, jogging, walking, watching the children’s games in the nearby parks. She kept an organic garden and used no herbicides or pesticides in it. About four blocks away, a plant that sterilized medical instruments with ethylene oxide had been operating for less than a year when the Kamudas moved in. She did not know it was there.

In 2007 she felt a lump in her breast. She had a lumpectomy, then chemotherapy and radiation, and during chemotherapy she wore a wig she disliked so that people would not pity her. The jurors were shown a photograph of the scar. She had no family history that predisposed her to cancer: no one in her family had had breast cancer, and a DNA test showed that she did not carry the known breast-cancer gene. Before the diagnosis she had led an active, healthy life and had been an avid runner who ran 5Ks with her family; she had not run since the illness, which she said ended her sense of being “bulletproof.” Had she known what the plant was releasing, she told the jury, she would have moved away.

Sterigenics built its defense on the commonality of breast cancer. Kamuda’s was an aggressive form of the disease, diagnosed twenty-two years after she and her husband moved to Willowbrook, about a third of a mile from the company’s medical-device sterilization plant, and in the summer of 2022 the companies told the jury that nothing tied her cancer to the ethylene oxide the plant had released. Ann Marie Duffy of Hollingsworth, opening for Sterigenics, told the jurors that breast cancer is the most common cancer in the world and usually results from natural errors when cells replicate. During Kamuda’s testimony, defense lawyers raised a helipad near her home and its closeness to a busy highway, and the companies pointed to other environmental factors, among them the nearby Kingery Highway, as possible causes. They brought in scientists to persuade the jurors that the plant had never endangered its neighbors. And they argued that Kamuda’s lawyer, Patrick A. Salvi II, had offered no proof that ethylene oxide caused her disease.

Salvi had laid out the other account on the trial’s first day. “At the end of the day, this case is simple,” he told the jurors in his opening statement on August 18. “These companies put too much of a carcinogen into the air, it went into a woman’s lungs and she got breast cancer.” He asked them to award at least $20 million to compensate her.

Less Than a Year After the Plant Opened

Griffith Foods, an Alsip company that owned the business from 1984 to 1999, built the Willowbrook plant in the early 1980s, and it opened in 1984 under Griffith’s subsidiary Micro-Biotrol. Three years earlier, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health had identified ethylene oxide as a suspected carcinogen. In his opening, Salvi told the jurors that Griffith had known of at least one detoxification plan that would have made the sterilizing safer and never adopted one before the plant opened, and that it had not analyzed how far the gas would travel into the community or how long it would remain in the air. The Kamudas moved in the next year. All three of their children attended school within a mile of the plant.

Inside the plant, workers sealed medical products in a room and released ethylene oxide into it. The gas penetrated boxes, wrapping, and packaging and killed every living microorganism on the products. Employees were strictly instructed to wear biohazard gear to protect themselves from the carcinogen. Before they could go back into the sterilization chamber, the gas was released from the building and into the surrounding community through a vacuum pump. Kamuda’s lawyers showed the jury a video of that process in their opening statements.

As late as 2016 the plant was emitting more than 4,000 pounds of ethylene oxide a year. The neighborhood learned what the plant had been emitting in August 2018, when the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported elevated cancer risk for the roughly 19,000 people living within a mile of it. Emissions data the company itself had reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed the Willowbrook census tract in the 99.9th percentile for cancer risk in the country. A neighbor told Kamuda about the federal findings and invited her to a community meeting. “I didn’t know what ethylene oxide was at that time,” she said later.

She sued in September 2018, in an effort to shut the plant down. “They’ve been poisoning us for years and they knew it,” she said that December. “The only solution is for them to get out of town. Now.” On February 15, 2019, after air testing found dangerous ethylene-oxide levels near the plant, including near schools, the Illinois EPA issued a seal order shutting it down. On September 30, 2019, Sterigenics announced that the Willowbrook plant would not reopen.

What the Former Chief Executive Knew

The trial opened before Judge Marguerite Quinn on August 18, 2022, and sixteen jurors heard the opening statements. Salvi had made himself learn every scientific data sheet and expert consultation in the case; in the last year before trial, he said, “I was entrenched in it.” He led a team that included Lance D. Northcutt and Jennifer M. Cascio of his firm, Shawn Collins and Margaret Galka of the Collins Law Firm, and Scott A. Entin, Roisin Duffy-Gideon, and Deanna N. Pihos of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Sidley Austin, Chuhak & Tecson, and Hollingsworth defended Sterigenics and Sotera Health; Perkins Coie defended Griffith.

Salvi’s opening went to the company’s own reports. Sterigenics, he told the jurors, had consistently understated its ethylene-oxide use to regulators. Its emission calculations shifted depending on whether it was reporting to the U.S. EPA or to the Illinois EPA, and “sometimes they would change the calculations based on nothing.”

On Friday, August 26, the jury heard from Michael Mulhern, who had become Sterigenics’ chief executive in 2011. He testified that one of his major duties in that job was the safety of the company’s employees and of the people who lived near its plants. He knew ethylene oxide was dangerous when he took over in 2011, he testified, but never issued directives to tighten the inconsistent emissions controls across the company’s facilities. He acknowledged that the company could have reduced its emissions in the early 2000s. When he left in 2016, the company’s profits had grown from about $94 million to $225 million.

Kamuda’s lawyers put emails and company documents before the jurors that, they said, showed the companies had known long ago that ethylene oxide was dangerous, had delayed installing pollution controls, and had worked to undermine federal rules that would have required costly upgrades. Their evidence was that for long stretches some sources of emissions at the plant had gone uncontrolled although the technology to control them existed, and that the companies had never modeled how their emissions would reach the community or measured ethylene oxide in the surrounding air. One of the plaintiff’s experts testified that the plant should never have been put in Willowbrook, that the companies could and should have controlled more of their emissions much earlier, and that they had not properly warned the community. Others testified that the emissions had raised ethylene-oxide concentrations at Kamuda’s home and contributed to her cancer.

Salvi accused Sterigenics of recklessly placing its plant near the Kingery Expressway and Interstate 55, close to homes. Kamuda’s lawyers argued that the plant had released gas at levels thousands of times above the limits government scientists agreed were safe, and that the companies had failed to install emission controls they knew had been available decades earlier. “They did not treat EtO like a carcinogen, they treated it like an ATM,” Salvi said during the trial. “They consistently underplayed their EtO use in reports to regulators so they could fly under the radar and continue making money off this toxic operation. They were paying their executives hundreds of millions of dollars, all while Sue and her neighbors were unknowingly being exposed to this insidious chemical.”

Sterigenics’ lawyers urged the jurors to “follow the science” and described the company as on the cutting edge of technology and always in compliance with regulatory limits. Griffith’s lawyers, led in opening by Christopher Wilson of Perkins Coie, argued that Griffith had not taken part in the emissions firsthand and had sold Micro-Biotrol, the business it once owned, by 1999.

Despite the Commonality

Closing arguments came on Thursday, September 15. Salvi asked the jurors for $346 million: $21 million to compensate Kamuda and $325 million in punitive damages. The defense told them again that no scientific evidence supported her claim.

Salvi answered in rebuttal, the plaintiff’s last word before the jury retires. Taken at its word, he told the jurors, the defense meant that no woman could come to court claiming a chemical exposure caused her cancer. He cited the scientific studies on ethylene oxide’s dangers. “Despite the commonality,” he said, “you cannot deny that EtO has been linked to breast cancer.”

The jurors began deliberating on Friday, went home without a verdict, and came back Monday morning. On September 19, 2022, after a five-week trial and a day of deliberations, the jury found that emissions from the Willowbrook plant caused Kamuda’s cancer. It found the companies negligent and their conduct willful and wanton, and it returned a verdict of $363 million: $38 million in compensatory damages and $325 million in punitive damages, assessed against Sterigenics ($220 million), its parent, Sotera Health ($100 million), and Griffith Foods, a corporate predecessor ($5 million). Salvi had asked for $346 million in his closing argument. Kamuda’s was the first of the Willowbrook ethylene-oxide cases to reach a jury, out of more than 760 then pending in the Circuit Court of Cook County.

“I thought that the numbers I asked for were reasonable,” Salvi said after the verdict. “They thought it ought to be even more.” Of Kamuda, the first of the Willowbrook plaintiffs to reach a jury, he said, “So much is riding on her.” “In her community,” he added, “there are hundreds and hundreds of people who filed lawsuits.”

“It was such a relief,” Kamuda, then 70, said of the verdict. “It’s been a long four years.” Her son, Brian, had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2021, about three years into the case; Salvi, who represented him as well, had scheduled depositions around his treatment. She had been barred from mentioning Brian’s illness at trial. “I hope this makes it easier for the rest of the plaintiffs,” she said. “I hope they get justice in court, too.”

“What this verdict tells us,” Salvi said, “is that decisions in the boardroom matter to people in their bedroom, in their living room, at the kitchen table.” He added: “We think this ought to set the tone. There’s a lot of victims out there.”

From One Verdict to a $408 Million Settlement

The companies said the verdict did not reflect the evidence presented in court, and Sterigenics maintained that it had always operated in compliance with the regulations meant to keep employees and the community safe. Salvi pointed to Willowbrook’s numbers. “It was determined that there was a statistically significant increase in breast cancer,” he said, and “clearly there’s too much cancer in the area and that’s why we’ve brought these lawsuits.” He also said: “We believe that the defendant really ought to wise up and come to the table.”

Sterigenics asked Judge Quinn to undo the verdict, and on December 19, 2022, she denied the motion. On January 9, 2023, the same day Sterigenics filed its notice of appeal, Sotera Health announced that its subsidiaries had agreed to pay $408 million to settle the more than 870 ethylene-oxide cases pending against Sterigenics in the Circuit Court of Cook County and the federal district court in Chicago. A trial for another Willowbrook plaintiff, Heather Schumacher, had been days away.

Sotera listed its reasons. It cited years of what it called biased media coverage in the Chicago area, “the significant costs of posting a large bond in support of the appeal of the Kamuda verdict,” and the time and expense of contesting hundreds of additional lawsuits through a multi-year process in the Illinois courts. The company denied liability, and the agreements provided that the settlements were not to be construed as an admission of it.

Salvi led the plaintiffs’ side of the negotiation with Shawn Collins; his own firm represented nearly 250 of the Willowbrook plaintiffs. “This agreement represents a remarkable achievement for the Plaintiffs and the people of Willowbrook, who have fought so hard over the past four years,” Salvi said. “Our hope is that hundreds of deserving families will soon be fairly compensated under this agreement and will avoid both the uncertainty of trial and the risk that their cases might be delayed for years, if not decades.”

Salvi signed the group term sheet on January 9 for his firm, one of seven on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee, which represented 870 eligible claimants. The agreements required substantially all of the plaintiffs to opt in to their individual allocations and dismiss their claims with prejudice, a stay of the pending Cook County suits, and a finding by the Circuit Court of Cook County that the settlements had been made in good faith under the Illinois Contribution Among Joint Tortfeasors Act. Sterigenics could walk away unless 99 percent of the committee’s claimants opted in, and 95 percent of the claimants represented by other firms. Disputes over participation and funding went to Miles Ruthberg, whose decision would be final. Sterigenics agreed to fund an escrow account by May 1, 2023, with final payment into a qualified settlement fund once court approval became final.

Individual allocations were to account for how close each claimant had lived to the plant and for how long, the type of cancer, the claimant’s age, and economic losses. The committee chose the claims administrator, who would apply a valuation matrix to set each payment, and the companies took no part in dividing the money. Liens against a claimant’s recovery were to be paid out of that claimant’s share.

On March 28, 2023, the parties signed final agreements covering 882 eligible claimants. Sterigenics deposited $408.0 million in escrow on May 1. Of the 882, 879 opted in. On June 22 the companies waived their right to walk away over the three who had not, and on June 23 the court entered its order confirming that the settlement had been made in good faith. On June 30 the money was released from escrow to the qualified settlement funds of the plaintiffs’ committee, and on July 6 the settling claimants’ claims against Sterigenics and Sotera were dismissed with prejudice.

Three Generations and House Bill 219

Salvi is the third generation of his family in the law. His father, Patrick A. Salvi, began practicing with his own father, Albert S. Salvi, in 1978 and founded the firm in Lake County in 1982. As a boy the younger Salvi went with his father to the summer inaugurations of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, where, he remembers, “the Bulls games would be playing”; his father was sworn in as its president in 1993. The son joined the firm in 2007 after graduating cum laude from the University of Notre Dame Law School, where the International Academy of Trial Lawyers gave him its award for excellence in trial advocacy. He is now the firm’s managing equity partner, and in 2022–23, the year of the Kamuda trial, he was the association’s 69th president, having taken office on June 17, 2022.

Illinois law had allowed punitive damages for a person who survived an injury but not in a suit brought for one who died. Salvi called that “a defect in the law.” As the association’s president he worked on House Bill 219 with State Representative Jay Hoffman and appeared as a witness for it before the judiciary committee. Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it on August 11, 2023. It allows the personal representative of a person who died to recover punitive damages in a wrongful-death action, with no cap on the amount, while exempting medical and legal malpractice claims and claims against state and local governments.

Christian Arroyo and the Two-Year Clock

Less than three years after his admission to the bar, Salvi was in federal court on a birth-injury claim against the United States. Christian Arroyo was born at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on May 17, 2003, more than a month before his due date—early enough that his mother, Maria Solorzano Arroyo, had missed the battery of late-pregnancy tests, including the test for group B streptococcus. She carried the bacteria, and Christian was infected during birth. He showed symptoms of the infection, but the obstetrician and the pediatrician responsible for the family’s care, Dr. Rahda B. Reddy and Dr. Verlainna Callentine, failed to detect it and did not treat him with antibiotics. He was left with spastic quadriplegia and cerebral palsy, a seizure disorder, a communications deficit, incontinence, and permanent pain. He cannot walk, talk, or eat by mouth.

The doctors worked for Erie Family Health Center, a federally funded clinic whose employees the Department of Health and Human Services had deemed employees of the U.S. Public Health Service, so the claim ran against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act and was tried to a judge. Salvi and David J. Pritchard represented Christian at a week-long bench trial before Judge Amy St. Eve of the Northern District of Illinois in January 2010. They argued that steps to prevent infection should have been taken before Christian was born and that the signs of a newborn’s infection had been missed. On April 2, 2010, Judge St. Eve found that both physicians had negligently failed to recognize and act on the risk factors and signs of infection, and that their failure to give antibiotics caused Christian’s injuries. She awarded $29.1 million.

The government appealed on the statute of limitations. A tort claim against the United States must be presented within two years after it accrues, and the government argued that the Arroyos’ claim accrued in mid-2003, when they learned that Christian’s injuries came from his mother’s infection. The family had sued the physicians in state court on December 30, 2005, presented an administrative claim to the Department of Health and Human Services in April 2006, and seen the case removed to federal court, with the United States substituted as defendant, in August 2007. The family’s answer was that the Arroyos had not known, and had no reason to know, that the brain injury had a doctor-related or government cause.

When the hospital discharged Christian on July 11, 2003, his doctors told his parents that he had suffered brain injuries caused by his exposure to his mother’s blood during birth. No one told them that treating the infection earlier could have prevented the injuries, and Judge St. Eve found no evidence that the parents then knew of any medical error. In July 2004, at the birth of her second son, Mrs. Arroyo first heard about the use of antibiotics in newborns. That October the parents watched a lawyer’s television commercial saying that injuries like Christian’s are often caused by physician malpractice.

The Seventh Circuit affirmed on September 1, 2011. Judge Richard Cudahy, writing for a panel that included Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judge Richard Posner, held that a claim under the act accrues when the plaintiff knows enough to suspect that a government act or omission may have caused the injury, or when a reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position would have known enough to prompt a deeper inquiry. Knowing that an infection caused the harm did not start the clock, because the infection was a concurrent cause independent of anything the government controlled. The clock starts once the plaintiff has reason to suspect a doctor-related cause, even before learning of negligence; in Judge Cudahy’s words, “accrual does not wait until the plaintiff learns that their injury was caused by a doctor’s negligence.” Christopher J. Wilmes argued the appeal for the family.

Judge Posner wrote separately. Mrs. Arroyo did not speak English, neither parent had gone to college, and the family, he wrote, could be assumed to live at or near the poverty line. When a court decides what knowledge to attribute to a malpractice plaintiff, he reasoned, it should either determine what that particular plaintiff knew or ask what people of approximately the same educational background and socioeconomic status would have known.

“We are very pleased that the Court of Appeals has affirmed this verdict on behalf of Christian,” Salvi said. “The money will be essential in giving this young man a chance in life, given his severe and permanent disabilities.”

Dry Ice in a Honda Fit

On August 5, 2016, Eric Johnson, a 64-year-old courier from Missouri, loaded crates of strawberries packed in dry ice into his 2016 Honda Fit at a St. Charles, Missouri, facility of PFD Supply, a Prairie Farms Dairy affiliate, for delivery to Arkansas. His company, CJS Express, had been hired to carry four coolers of frozen strawberries to Fayetteville. A rear window was down when he left, as is required when carrying dry ice. About ninety minutes later he was found unresponsive in his parked car, the engine running and every window up, slumped over the steering wheel in a parking lot off the highway, still in St. Charles. A police officer, who noticed a strong, sharp odor consistent with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, performed CPR before paramedics took him to a hospital. He died three days later. His medical records showed no preexisting condition that would have caused a death like his. He and Paula Johnson had been married forty-two years and had five children, two of them disabled.

As dry ice warms it turns directly into carbon dioxide gas, which in a closed passenger compartment displaces the oxygen a driver breathes. No one in the case disputed that a single open window would have provided enough ventilation to potentially avoid harm. Paula Johnson, his widow, sued Prairie Farms Dairy and PFD Supply in 2017 in Madison County, Illinois, where Prairie Farms has its headquarters. “Despite fully understanding the dangers of transporting dry ice in a subcompact vehicle, Prairie Farms Dairy never ensured training, written protocols, or that any warnings would go to Mr. Johnson regarding the serious risks involved,” Salvi said. Johnson’s lawyers also charged that the defendants had no hazard-communication program of the kind OSHA requires and did not properly mark the containers with hazardous-materials warnings. At trial they presented evidence that Prairie Farms had been cited under the OSHA hazard-communication standard before Johnson’s death and several times afterward, and that it still lacked a proper hazard-communication program for dry ice.

Prairie Farms argued that Johnson had presented himself as a sophisticated, professional courier who knew how to transport dry ice safely and needed no further instruction, and that a death in Missouri involving a Missouri family did not belong in an Illinois court. The forum argument failed. Trial opened on February 19, 2026, before Judge Dennis R. Ruth, with HeplerBroom defending Prairie Farms. Salvi represented the family with his father, Lance D. Northcutt, David J. Rashid, and Kristen M. Stoicescu, and on February 27, 2026, the jury returned a verdict of $241 million against Prairie Farms and PFD Supply. “Given the choice, this family would return every dollar for one more day with their husband and father,” Salvi said. Prairie Farms later settled with the family and assigned Paula Johnson its rights against its insurer, Travelers, and on March 31, 2026, Salvi’s firm sued Travelers on her behalf in federal court in southern Illinois to pursue payment.

Paula Johnson, 73, closed her sewing business to take over her husband’s courier business after his death, and she cares for the couple’s two disabled adult children. “We hope that this verdict prevents future tragedies like this one,” she said. “Having some resources to give her some respite at 73 years old, while she continues to take care of her 29-year-old daughter and 36-year old son, is the most important thing,” Salvi said.