A north-west Louisiana jury has handed down a $1.1 billion verdict to Pamela Elaine Lockridge, who sued alleging she was sexually molested by her late stepfather, Leroy Edwards, for 14 years beginning when she was four years old in 1962. The judgment, returned Tuesday in Bossier Parish after a two-day trial, is among the largest civil awards for a child sexual abuse case tried under the state’s so-called “lookback law.”
Jurors found that Edwards subjected Lockridge to criminal sexual molestation from the time she was a preschooler through her adolescence. According to court proceedings, Edwards — the second husband of Lockridge’s mother — threatened to kill her if she ever reported the abuse. He died in 2023.
Lockridge, now an intensive care unit nurse, eventually asked Edwards to pay for mental health counseling. According to the lawsuit, he responded by obtaining a restraining order against her in 2011. In the process, he told the Bossier sheriff’s department that he had molested his ex-wife’s daughter when she was a minor. However, decades had passed since the abuse occurred, and criminal prosecution was no longer possible.
Lockridge first sued Edwards for damages in 2012, but he successfully moved to have the case dismissed by arguing the filing deadline had long expired under Louisiana law at the time.
Louisiana’s “lookback law,” passed in 2021 and upheld as constitutional by the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2024, gave Lockridge a second chance. The law temporarily eliminated civil filing deadlines for lawsuits involving child molestation, opening a window for survivors whose claims would have otherwise been barred by statutes of limitation. Lockridge refiled, seeking damages for what she described as lifelong trauma.
The case went to trial beginning with jury selection Monday. Jurors heard from a sheriff’s detective, two mental health professionals, and Lockridge’s husband of 43 years, Mark. After roughly two hours of deliberation Tuesday, they awarded her $500 million for pain and suffering, $600 million in punitive damages, and $585,000 for past and future medical and psychological expenses — a total of $1.1 billion.
Lockridge’s lead attorney, Ryan Gatti, a former Louisiana state legislator, said neither he nor his client expects to collect the full award from Edwards’s estate. He said he anticipates reaching an undisclosed settlement with the estate, which in such a circumstance would forgo appealing the verdict. Nonetheless, Gatti said the verdict “made it too expensive to come to our state and abuse a child.”
Gatti told the jury in his closing that the verdict should send two messages: “that survivors who have lived in silence and shame deserve to be heard and honored; and … that the passage of time does not erase accountability for those who sexually abuse children.”
Lockridge said in a statement: “This case was never about money. It was about truth. It was about accountability. It was about finally being heard.”
She added: “I feel for the first time in a very long time … that justice has finally spoken. I also hope this verdict sends a message that children are precious, families deserve protection, and that time does not erase responsibility for those who abuse the vulnerable.”
The case is the second known trial verdict under Louisiana’s lookback law. In June 2025, a federal jury in New Orleans ordered the Holy Cross Catholic religious order to pay $2.4 million in damages to a man who reported childhood sexual abuse by a member of the order in the late 1960s.