After two days of testimony about the worst day of his life, about the crash and the injuries that should have killed him, the former state trooper finally felt weightless.
A jury had just awarded Ezra Ganeshananda a $106.8 million settlement, one of the largest in Prince George’s County Circuit Court history, for the pain and suffering he had endured in the five years since a man in a Mercedes crashed into the back of his patrol car on the shoulder of the Capital Beltway at nearly 80 mph.
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Ganeshananda, then 26, was crushed inside — his injuries so severe he should have died. But two weeks later, he woke up from a coma, craving accountability.
Now, in a courtroom in Upper Marlboro, Md., he felt it had finally come.
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But as he and his family prepared to leave, he was confronted with one final question, which he had previously met with hesitance. Would Ganeshananda, his lawyer asked, be willing to talk to the man who had driven the Mercedes that day?
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This time, the former state trooper said “yes.”
A devastating crash
On the afternoon of April 14, 2016, Ganeshananda was inside his patrol car parked on the right shoulder of the Capital Beltway in Prince George’s County, Md., helping a motorist whose vehicle had broken down. That vehicle was parked in front of him, and ahead of them both was a flatbed tow truck.
To the trooper’s left, stop-and-go traffic was inching along the Washington region’s main commuter route. It had been just eight months since Ganeshananda had graduated from the police academy, where he had learned how to safely do this part of the job.
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But what happened next was outside his control.
About a half a mile behind him, a car had just tapped the bumper of a Mercedes driven by a man headed north to New Jersey. Instead of stopping, authorities said, the man accelerated. Witnesses watched the Mercedes drive onto the left shoulder and hit the barrier, before cutting back across traffic to the right shoulder, according to authorities, the car climbing to about 80 mph across the length of about 10 football fields.
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Moments after he had been rear-ended, the Mercedes driver rear-ended Ganeshananda’s patrol car, smashing into it with such force that it launched the trooper’s cruiser into the broken down car before him at a rate of about 37 mph, authorities said.
The Mercedes then skidded into oncoming traffic, was hit by a tow truck, police said, and slammed into Ganeshananda’s vehicle again.
Traffic came to a complete stop, a helicopter descended from above and authorities worked for an hour to cut through the twist of metal that had become Ganeshananda’s cruiser — a rescue mission that would usually take 15 minutes.
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Ganeshananda was airlifted to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, and as word spread, the governor and a convoy of state troopers flooded the hospital.
At the same time, Ganeshananda’s older brother, Jhohan, was waking up in the siblings’ shared apartment to a heavy knock on their door. It was the afternoon, but he had been sleeping off his night shift. The Ganeshananda brothers — both state troopers — left home in New Jersey for jobs in law enforcement, first in Virginia as correctional officers, then in Maryland as police officers.
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Together, they had also prepared for the risks of the job, which is why a car accident was far from Jhohan’s mind as he was rushed to the hospital in Baltimore by a colleague who knew little about what had happened to his brother. A traffic stop gone bad, Jhohan thought, maybe a shooting.
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Finally at the hospital, he learned different versions of the story and watched live news footage of his brother’s crumpled cruiser on the waiting room TV. Their parents and other brother, Roshan, arrived from New Jersey. They wondered how this could have happened, what led the man in the Mercedes to drive so recklessly.
“Of course I wasn’t prepared for this,” Jhohan Ganeshananda recalled in an interview. “I was shocked every single moment up there.”
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The family spent their days navigating doctors and trying to translate complex medical terminology from English to Tamil, their language in Sri Lanka. They learned Ezra’s injuries were exhaustive and devastating. Broken bones in his neck, spine, right hip, ribs and both legs. Lacerated kidney and liver. Impaired vision. Internal bleeding. Brain damage. Heart damage. Meningitis.
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He lost so much blood that he needed five transfusions.
For two weeks, he lay at the hospital in a coma. His mother, Gnaneswary Ganeshananda, rarely left his side.
Her voice was the first Ezra heard when he finally woke, unaware of where he was or what had happened.
“You’re okay,” she said again and again. “I’ll take care of you.”
Closing a chapter
Before Ezra had even woke up from his coma, his family had begun seeking justice.
They reached out to one of Washington’s top personal injury attorneys, Peter Grenier, who learned after taking on the case that authorities would not be filing charges against the Mercedes driver.
Grenier said law enforcement told him that the report from the accident reconstructionist with the Maryland state police had been inconclusive.
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Jhohan said that news was hard to hear.
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“Not only for me and Ezra, and also the rest of the troopers on the road doing this work,” he said. “They’re going to feel this.”
So the family filed a lawsuit against the Mercedes driver in 2017, eventually obtaining a copy of the state police’s investigative report, which outlined the driver’s explanation for what happened that day.
The man, who lived in New Jersey but worked in Virginia as a financial consultant, was driving home when he was hit from behind, the police report said. He told authorities he lost control of his vehicle, and believed he was pressing the brake when, authorities concluded, he was actually hitting the accelerator.
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Investigators found nothing faulty with his brakes, and wrote in the conclusion that the Mercedes driver bore “sole responsibility” for the collision. Officials said there was evidence the man tried to swerve to avoid colliding with Ganeshananda’s car.
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Multiple attempts to reach the driver were unsuccessful. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
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After delays from pandemic court closures, the civil case went to trial this fall — five years after the crash.
His attorney emphasized the devastation of Ganeshananda’s lifelong injuries. He still has a shunt in his brain to drain excessive spinal fluid into his abdomen. He sometimes struggles with his speech and comprehension. Where he once ran up to seven miles a day, now he needs help to walk.
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Ganeshananda never returned to his job as a Maryland state trooper, and his brother stepped away from law enforcement, too. During a break at the trial, Jhohan told Grenier that working crash after crash reminded him of the one that almost killed his brother.
When Ezra testified, his attorney saw several members of the jury cry.
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He talked about how he remembers only flashes from that day, the way his whole body screamed but he couldn’t, how everything slowly went dark and quiet and peaceful, like when the credits roll at the end of a movie.
But since then, he told the jury, he had earned a degree in cybersecurity and worked on contract for Booz Allen Hamilton. He struggled hard in rehab to recover and tried to accept his place in the world.
“The movie isn’t over,” he said later in an interview.
The jury deliberated for two hours, then awarded Ganeshananda and his family $105,541,440 for their pain and suffering, which the court was forced to reduce to the state’s legal cap of $815,000. The jury also awarded an additional $1.25 million to cover medical expenses.
Ganeshananda sat in shock, he said, feeling grateful for his family and for his attorney.
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“I got justice with the help of Peter,” he said. “So I told Peter, I would like to close this chapter.”
When an attorney for the Mercedes driver asked if his client could speak to Ganeshananda, the former state trooper said yes.
The man extended his hand to Ganeshananda, the former trooper recalled, and he grabbed it. The man said he was sorry, over and over again, and tears rolled from his eyes.
Then Ganeshananda pulled him into a hug, and left the man who hurt him with a final message: “You have to take care of yourself.”
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