A dad died in a Highway 50 crash in Sacramento. Now Caltrans is getting sued
Caltrans was hit with a lawsuit over a pileup in a Highway 50 construction zone that killed a Northern California father last January.
The complaint calls the half-billion-dollar Fix 50 project “a magnet for collisions, injuries and fatalities.” Fix 50’s central aim is to alleviate traffic on Highway 50 with the addition of high-occupancy lanes. Construction began 2021 and is still underway, although the remaining lane splits were removed last month.
Brian Kipton Shaw, 42, of Paradise was riding a motorcycle Jan. 12, 2025, with a group of 13 bikes and two cars from the Vituscan Riders Motorcycle Club. The group was traveling west in the far left lane near the Stockton Boulevard exit when, the lawsuit says, a driver approaching a lane split in the middle of the roadway veered into the group. According to the lawsuit, the driver clipped a motorcyclist and then slammed on his brakes, causing a pile-up. Boxed in by the single-lane area of the construction zone, the motorcyclists were unable to avoid collisions, and they hit the sedan, each other, the concrete barrier to their left or the concrete construction barriers to their right.
Shaw’s widow, Roberta Talley; their two adult children; and 32 other plaintiffs have sued over the crash. They alleged that the construction zone did not have proper signage and was not safe. Other plaintiffs sued over personal injuries sustained in the crash as well as the suffering caused by witnessing Shaw’s death. Several of the plaintiffs are the wives or partners of riders involved in the crash who have had to deal with the aftermath.
In addition to Caltrans, the lawsuit names the construction contractors including the lead contractor, Flatiron Dragados. The plaintiffs are also suing the driver involved in the crash.
A spokesperson for Caltrans District 3, Steve Nelson, said that safety is the agency’s highest priority, but that he could not comment directly on the active litigation. Flatiron Dragados spokesperson Mike Swenson also declined to comment due to the company’s policy on legal matters.
The lawsuit, first reported by KVIE’s Abridged, was filed Dec. 31 in Sacramento Superior Court. The complaint explains that Shaw’s family has still not received the collision investigation report from the California Highway Patrol’s Valley Division. To ensure a legal filing deadline was met, the family and the other plaintiffs filed the lawsuit at the end of 2025 before receiving the agency’s report.
Shaw proudly posted many photos of his two kids on Facebook and wrote about his work organizing an annual haunted house that raised money for charity.
He had an affinity for Animal, the Muppet, and friends wrote on social media that he was a riot. Shortly after his death, Talley posted a photo of her late husband posing like a 1700s general in an oil painting while wearing nothing but a tiny pair of striped briefs.
His humor helped him cultivate a huge group of friends. A video on Facebook shows hundreds of them filling an Elks Lodge auditorium for his memorial last January.
A prior wrongful death lawsuit was brought over Fix 50 after the crash that killed Ronald Fitzgerald, another motorcyclist. He died after colliding with a vehicle that had stalled and, the complaint said, gotten stuck in a lane because that part of the construction zone had no shoulder. Fitzgerald’s widow, Tracey Young Fitzgerald, wrote that in her late husband, she had found “a love that people spend their whole life looking for.”
