ST. LOUIS – The Missouri Supreme Court has overturned a St. Louis jury’s 2022 decision to award $1.3 million to the family of a boy who was struck by a hit-and-run driver in 2019 after getting off a school bus.

In October 2019, nine-year-old Dylan Jackson, a fourth-grader at KIPP Victory Academy, was dropped off from his school bus and attempted to cross the street at Goodfellow Boulevard and Lalite Avenue when a car drove around the bus, struck Jackson and took off from the scene, investigators say.

Three years later, a St. Louis jury initially ordered school bus company First Student Inc. to pay damages to Jackson’s family. At the time, jurors determined the bus company was negligent by not providing a new driver with instructions on where Jackson should have been dropped off moments before he was struck by a hit-and-run driver.

Leading up to that, a lawsuit alleged that First Student and its bus driver were negligent by letting Jackson off at the wrong corner, which required him to cross several lanes of traffic to get home,. The lawsuit also claimed that Jackson told the driver one day earlier that his normal drop-off location was a different corner of the Goodfellow-Lalite intersection.

On Friday, the Missouri Supreme Court voted 5-2 to reverse the $1.3 million verdict for a judgment in First Student’s favor.

According to Missouri court documents, First Student argued on appeal that the circuit court should have ruled in its favor because the company could not be held liable for the criminal actions of the hit-and-run driver.

The Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling will send the case back to the St. Louis Circuit Court for review and orders for a rehearing to be refiled within 15 days.