U.S. Jury Awards $33 Million in Silicosis Case Against Caesarstone
Key Facts
A jury on October 21, 2026, awarded $33 million to the family of Jose Luis Martir Navarro and Silvia Rebeca Gudiel Garcia in a silicosis case linked to the manufacture of engineered stone surfaces, according to a statement published by plaintiffs’ counsel Brayton Purcell LLP on PR Newswire. The verdict was against Caesarstone Ltd and Caesarstone USA, Inc. jointly, after the jury found a design defect under the risk-utility test. The jury assigned 11% of the liability to each entity, or 22% to the company and its U.S. arm combined. This was the fifth verdict for plaintiffs in U.S. trials involving silicosis linked to engineered stone, according to the law firm. The amount is a jury verdict; the statement did not disclose the status of any appeal or the verdict’s ultimate financial impact.
The total award comprises $25 million in non-economic damages for Navarro and $8 million for his wife, Garcia, for loss of consortium, according to Brayton Purcell’s statement. The breakdown reflects separate compensation for the harm to the worker and the harm his family said his wife suffered. The statement provided no further breakdown of the damages or indication whether the amounts could change after subsequent proceedings. In its account of the verdict, the law firm linked the case to a design defect in engineered stone products, while the jury set each entity’s share of liability at 11%. The firm said the trial was the sixth of its kind in the United States involving silicosis linked to these products.
Navarro developed silicosis after working for 13 years manufacturing engineered stone surfaces and was 63 when he became ill, according to a statement from the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Those details place the case in the context of occupational exposure to silica dust during surface manufacturing, a subject of other claims facing the company. In its second-quarter results, Caesarstone disclosed about 800 people seeking damages for injuries related to silica-dust exposure as of June 30, 2026, including about 600 in the United States. The company also recorded a provision for estimated losses of $51.2 million and global insurance receivables of $12.0 million as of the same date. It said the vast majority of U.S. claims remain at an early stage or are classified only as reasonably possible losses, and therefore it has not recorded a provision for them.
Caesarstone faces a legal path with mixed outcomes, according to its annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In August 2024, a jury awarded plaintiffs $52.4 million in a similar case, allocating 15% of the damages to the company, while another case ended in May 2025 with a full defense verdict. In a separate case, the U.S. Supreme Court on October 5, 2026, rejected Caesarstone’s petition to challenge a California appeals court decision. That petition does not concern the October 21 verdict, which was issued in the current trial, based on differences in the facts described in the filing and the lawyers’ statement. The company said in its annual filing that it expects additional verdicts in the coming months and that multiple losses in silicosis cases could materially affect its business.
The verdict coincides with regulatory action in California concerning engineered stone containing crystalline silica. The state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health published an updated draft proposing a ban on the manufacture and fabrication of engineered stone containing 1.0% or more crystalline silica. The division set October 30, 2026, as the deadline for comments on the draft. The deadline falls days after the jury verdict, while the draft remains a regulatory proposal, not an effective ban, according to published information. The regulatory actions and successive lawsuits put the company on two separate tracks, one involving injury claims and the other proposed rules for manufacturing and fabricating the products.
In trading, CSTE posted mixed closes over the five sessions from October 19 to 23, 2026, according to EL7 data. It closed at $2.15 on October 19, then at $2.33 on October 20. The stock closed at $2.68 on October 21, the day the verdict was issued, before ending the next session at $2.41. On October 23, the stock closed at $2.34. These closing prices alone do not isolate the verdict’s effect from other factors that may influence the stock’s movement.