What a Cheaper Design Bought. What Rebekah Hillman Paid.

Picture an ordinary June afternoon. Rebekah Hillman is cutting the grass on the property she shares with her wife Jennifer and their daughter. The mower snags in a flower bed at the back of the yard. This kind of thing happens to anyone who owns a riding mower. It is not a crisis. It is a Tuesday.

Jennifer comes outside to help. She does what the mower’s own design requires her to do to tow it: she pushes in the bypass pins to put the rear wheels in neutral. She pulls the mower free. She is helping her wife. That is the whole story up to this point. A couple working together in their own backyard.

Then Rebekah gets back on, starts the engine, and pushes the motion control levers forward to resume mowing. She has every reason to expect this will work. She is sitting on her own property, using a product her family bought and trusted, doing something she has presumably done dozens of times before. The mower does not respond the way it should. It does not move forward. Instead, it begins to slide backward down the slope.

She tries to use the levers to stop it. Nothing. She tries the electric parking brake. Nothing. The mower picks up speed, at first gradually, then fast as it hits the steeper drop near the flower bed at the edge of the retaining wall. A six-foot drop onto gravel is coming up beneath her.

She tries to jump clear.

She cannot make it. The mower comes down on top of her as she lands. The impact fractures her right knee. The bones in her left leg are destroyed. Her left leg below the knee is amputated.

Jennifer Hillman and their daughter are part of this lawsuit too. The court record does not detail what they witnessed or what their lives have looked like since June 2020. It does not have to. A spouse and a child watching a family member go over a retaining wall on a runaway lawnmower carries its own weight. The court lists them as plaintiffs with resulting injuries of their own. The law calls these consortium and bystander damages. The human translation is that this event did not stop at Rebekah’s body.

The thing to sit with is this: a brake that could have stopped the mower existed. It was available from the manufacturer of the hydrostatic motor already inside the Timecutter. It was already installed on another Toro product. A John Deere version using two steel pawls and a lever, the kind of design a competent machinist could sketch in an afternoon, was certified to hold on slopes more than three times steeper than the Hillmans’ backyard. Toro’s own expert said adding it would be “adding unnecessary cost” but never named the cost. The company did not name the cost because a specific dollar figure would have made the calculation visible: what Toro saved per mower, weighed against Rebekah Hillman’s left leg.

What the Documents Actually Say

The Hillmans’ experts did not invent a safety standard. They cited the industry’s own engineers telling manufacturers exactly what Toro chose to ignore.

Who Else Gets Hurt When Manufacturers Choose Cost Over Safety

Public Health

This is not a story about one unusual accident. It is a story about a product category, zero-radius-turn mowers, that is sold to residential consumers, often older adults maintaining their own property, and that operates on slopes, near drop-offs, and in conditions where loss of control can be catastrophic.

• Rebekah Hillman sustained amputation of her left leg below the knee and fractures to her right knee after the Timecutter, with no functional brake, rolled off a six-foot retaining wall onto a gravel bed. These are permanent, life-altering injuries from a product sold for routine residential lawn maintenance.
• The court record notes that Toro’s discovery covered loss-of-control incidents involving the Timecutter going back to 2005. The opinion does not quantify these incidents, but their existence over a fifteen-year period confirms that runaway or uncontrolled mower events are not theoretical. They have a documented history.
• The Fluid Power Safety Institute’s warning that “there are simply too many things that can go wrong” covers not just bypass pins but worn transmission lines, motor degradation, valve failure, and hydraulic oil loss. Every Timecutter owner operating on an incline faces this risk whether or not they ever touch the bypass pins.
• Jennifer Hillman and the couple’s minor daughter, P.J.H., are co-plaintiffs in this lawsuit, citing injuries resulting from Rebekah’s accident. The law categorizes these as loss of consortium and related claims. The practical meaning is that catastrophic product injuries routinely extend to families, not just the individual at the controls.
• Illinois intermediate courts require expert testimony to establish design defects involving specialized knowledge. When district courts improperly exclude that testimony wholesale, as happened here, seriously injured consumers can be stripped of their right to a jury trial on procedural grounds before the merits of their case are ever examined.

Economic Inequality

The economics of this case reveal a dynamic that repeats across product liability litigation: the cost of a safety feature is knowable and small; the cost of not having it is borne entirely by the consumer.

• Toro’s own expert described the independent brake as “adding unnecessary cost” but did not provide a dollar figure. The Seventh Circuit explicitly noted that “neither party has quantified the cost per machine.” This absence of a number is itself informative: a company that had a small, defensible per-unit cost would name it. Refusing to quantify suggests the number would not survive comparison to Rebekah Hillman’s medical and lifetime care costs.
• The independent brake alternatives identified in the record, including a lever-and-pawl steel-pawl design from John Deere and disc brake components from Hydro-Gear, are not advanced engineering. They are basic mechanical components already in commercial production and available for integration at the time the 2013 Timecutter was designed. The cost of manufacturing them into the product at scale would have been a fraction of a single personal injury settlement.
• Pursuing a products liability case in federal court requires multiple expert witnesses (the Hillmans hired three), years of litigation, and appellate review, all before a trial date is set. Families without the resources to sustain that process do not get their cases reversed by the Seventh Circuit. They simply lose. This case made it to the appeals court; the vast majority of similarly situated consumers would not reach that point.
• Toro is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Minnesota. The Hillmans are Illinois residents. The company has the resources to litigate aggressively, challenge every expert witness, and seek summary judgment on procedural grounds. The structural advantage in product liability litigation systematically favors manufacturers over individual injured consumers.
• The broader zero-radius-turn mower market caters to residential customers who are purchasing based on marketing, brand reputation, and price, not access to engineering standards documents from the American Society of Agricultural Engineers. Consumers have no practical way to know that the brake system in their mower does not meet the standards that engineers in the field have documented as necessary.

What Toro Chose Not to Buy