GEICO has locked in a $50,000 cap on a wrongful death payout after Rhode Island's top court sided with the insurer.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court on May 19, 2026 affirmed that GEICO General Insurance Company owes no more than its $50,000 per-person bodily injury limit to Fama Diop, whose husband, Papa Ndoye, died in a January 24, 2023 crash. The driver, a minor at the time, was insured under a GEICO policy issued to his mother, Marie Gill.
The policy carried $50,000 per person and $100,000 per occurrence in bodily injury liability. Diop wanted the bigger number, and then some. After sending GEICO a demand letter, she filed a wrongful death suit, as administratrix of Ndoye's estate, against Gill and her son. She then counterclaimed for $250,000, the minimum she said was owed under Rhode Island's Death by Wrongful Act statute.
GEICO filed a declaratory judgment action to pin down what it actually owed. Its position was straightforward: only one person suffered bodily injury, Ndoye, so the per-person limit applied.
The policy language did the work. The per-person clause caps the insurer's liability for all damages, including damages for care and loss of services, tied to bodily injury sustained by one person in one occurrence. The per-occurrence clause kicks in only when two or more people are bodily injured in the same accident.
Diop and her children were not in the car. Their loss-of-consortium claims, which compensate surviving family members for the loss of a relative's companionship and support, flowed from Ndoye's injuries, not their own.
The trial justice ruled that a 1992 Rhode Island Supreme Court decision, Allstate Insurance Company v. Pogorilich, controlled. Pogorilich held that the per-person amount is the total cap for all damages arising out of bodily injury to one person in any one motor vehicle accident, and that a loss-of-consortium claim is derivative of the injured spouse's claim, not an independent one.
On appeal, Diop argued Pogorilich should not apply because it involved a personal injury case rather than a wrongful death case. Justice Melissa A. Long, writing for the court, was not persuaded. The policy language, she wrote, does not distinguish between policyholders and people injured by someone covered by the policy. Diop pointed to no conclusive authority for separating a statutory wrongful death claim from a common law personal injury claim when reading an insurance contract.
The court treated the policy the way it treats any contract: looking at the four corners of the document and giving the terms their plain, ordinary meaning.
Whether the state's $250,000 wrongful death minimum applies in the underlying case is still an open question. The trial justice declined to rule on it while the wrongful death action is pending and denied Diop's counterclaim for summary judgment without prejudice. Diop's appeal did not develop an argument on that point, so the Supreme Court treated it as waived.
The takeaway for auto carriers is straightforward. When policy language is clear and only one person suffers bodily injury, derivative claims from surviving family members sit under the single per-person cap, even when the underlying lawsuit is a statutory wrongful death action.
