By admin 
Sacramento Kings minority owner Phil Oates should pay $45 million to the widow of a motorcyclist who died in a vehicle collision caused by the wealthy developer, the woman’s attorney told a Placer County jury on Tuesday.
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Oates, 75, was not criminally charged nor found to be grossly negligent in connection with the 2024 crash. But the collision upended the life of Miranda Flores, attorney Roger Dreyer said, leading her to sue the businessman for what she says is the value of her husband’s life.
Closing arguments in the case began Tuesday before a jury of eight men and four women in the historic Placer County courthouse in Auburn. They will be tasked with assigning a value to a human life in the absence of criminality or gross negligence, a tricky job made harder by vast disagreements between the two sides over how to measure loss.
Jurors are not being asked to decide whether Oates, who has taken responsibility for the crash, should be held liable, and they will be barred from assessing punitive damages against the developer.
But Dreyer, who argued the case alongside his daughter Natalie, said the economic and personal loss to Flores, along with compensation for pain suffered by her husband, Patrick Mulderrig before he died, still added up to millions.
“Reasonable doesn’t mean a bargain,” he told the jury, referring to the panel’s job of determining a reasonable amount of compensation for Flores. “Don’t be afraid of numbers.”
Flores, he said, should be paid $10 million for Mulderrig’s pain, suffering and disfigurement even though he did not emerge from a coma after the collision, dying five hours later in a Roseville hospital.
She should also be paid $30 million for the emotional and personal impact of her husband’s death, along with another $5 million for economic losses and expenses, Dreyer said.
Mulderrig, who died at 60, was such a good husband, Dreyer argued, that Flores should be paid three times the amount usually paid to compensate for the loss of household tasks performed by a deceased spouse.
Attorneys for Oates, who has taken responsibility for the crash, are expected to make their closing arguments Thursday,
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The businessman, who has attended every hearing in the case, testified last week that he did not initially see Mulderrig driving toward him on Douglas Boulevard in Granite Bay.
Oates said he had already begun to turn left into his neighborhood when he saw Mulderrig approaching on his red Harley-Davidson Sportster. He tried to speed up his turn to avoid Mulderrig, a retired California Highway Patrol officer, but the motorcyclist, trying to avoid Oates, veered into the right-hand lane and crashed into the rear of the Kings owner’s Cadillac.
The impact was so severe that Mulderrig was thrown into the air and landed 15 feet away. Oates’ car was spun around backwards by 180 degrees.
Oates’ attorney, Chris Hogan, is expected to argue that Flores is demanding an excessive amount of money, and that Mulderrig would not have experienced pain and suffering because he was in a coma.
Last week, the CHP officer who responded to the early evening collision testified that Mulderrig was unconscious when he arrived at the scene and did not move or awaken before he died.
But Dreyer argued that the motorcyclist still had brain activity and would have felt pain even when unconscious.
“He was alive and breathing and fighting to live,” Dreyer said.
Dreyer downplayed the evidence offered by experts testifying in Oates’ defense, putting quotation marks around the word “witnesses” in a slide shown to the jury.
He showed the jury photos of Mulderrig and Flores together, along with pictures with relatives and a photo of their dog, Buster. He capped his argument by reading from a poem popular at funerals called “The Dash,” by author Linda Ellis, which uses the punctuation mark between the dates of a person’s birth and death to say what matters is the span of life lived in between.
Flores, who attended jury selection and testified in the trial, was not in court Tuesday.
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