A St. Louis family will receive a settlement of $745 million after their daughter was tragically killed when she was hit by a 20-year-old driver who was huffing nitrous oxide as she left work in October 2020.
The trial hinged on whether or not lawyers could prove that the manufacturers of Whip-It! worked in cahoots with a smoke shop to sell the nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, which is inhaled through a balloon, in the knowledge that purchasers would abuse the substance.
What happened
Marissa Politte, 25, was hit by an SUV being driven by 20-year-old Trenton Geiger shortly after he had been inhaling Whip It!
This caused him to fall asleep at the wheel, documents in the case state. Geiger’s parents were the owners of the car.
Marissa was leaving her job at the Ballwin Total Access Urgent Care on outskirts of St. Louis at the time.
Prior to the crash, authorities said that Geiger disposed of the nitrous oxide chargers, known as ‘whippets,’ in a wooded area.
He bought the laughing gas at a smoke shop named the Coughing Cardinal in Des Peres, Missouri.
The chargers are supposed to be used as a food propellent in order to make whipped cream.
In the trial, the Politte family lawyers, Johnny M. Simon and his father, John G. Simon, were able to prove to a jury that the company includes selling Whip It! to smoke shops as part of its business plan.
‘They’re selling poison disguised as something else,’ Johnny M. Simon said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Settlement fee
‘Each one of those makes 16 ounces of whip cream, so even if they had plausible reasons for selling it, which they don’t, that’s a … a lot of whip cream for a place that doesn’t sell any food,’ the attorney said in a separate statement to KSDK.
The terms of the settlement will see 70 percent or $520 million of the $745 million being paid by United Brands Products Design Development, the company behind Whip It!, 20 percent, $148 million, from the Coughing Cardinal and ten percent, $74 million, from Trenton Geiger.
Sentencing
Geiger, now 23, was sentenced to two years in prison in March this year after pleading guilty to second-degree involuntary manslaughter, possession of a controlled substance, tampering with physical evidence and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia as part of a deal with prosecutors.
He was also forced to pay a $250 fine. A toxicology report found that the suspect had THC in his system at the time of Politte’s death.
