A Georgia widow’s lawsuit blames a 6-inch lift kit on a Ford F-150 for her husband’s fatal crash

Lolita Holloway, of Georgia, sued in September in the State Court of Gwinnett County over the death of her husband, Charles Holloway Jr., who was killed on Jan. 8 when a Ford F-150 crossed the center line and struck his Toyota Tundra head-on. The complaint puts the blame well beyond the driver: it says a 6-inch aftermarket suspension lift kit turned a survivable collision into a fatal one.

Six defendants are named, from the man behind the wheel to the corporate parent of the company that sold the kit. Every claim below is an allegation in a civil complaint, and no court has found anyone liable.

The complaint against Kneiss, Courtesy Ford and four lift-kit companies

According to Repairer Driven News, which reported the filing on Oct. 6, the suit names Scott Douglas Kneiss, who was driving the F-150; Courtesy Ford, the dealership; GRJ Offroad; Sport Truck; Fox Factory, described as Sport Truck’s holding company; and RealTruck, identified as the maker of the aftermarket equipment. The report does not spell out which entity performed the installation and which only designed or sold the kit, and the same is true of Autoblog’s Oct. 9 account, which says the companies are sued for designing, manufacturing, marketing, distributing, installing and selling the lift.

The central allegation concerns geometry. The suit says the 6-inch lift raised the F-150’s ride height, suspension geometry, frame rails and crash structures above factory specifications, so that the pickup’s rigid structures rode over the Tundra’s frame rails and energy-absorbing front end and drove into the cabin. In the complaint’s words, quoted by Repairer Driven News, “the lift kit caused catastrophic intrusion into the occupant survival space of the Toyota Tundra.” The filing also says Holloway would likely have survived without the kit.

A second theory targets electronics. The complaint alleges the kit and the altered suspension interfered with the F-150’s crash-avoidance, collision-mitigation and warning systems, keeping them from working as Ford designed them to.

The Georgia suspension statute the suit invokes

The plaintiff leans on state law. Per Repairer Driven News, the complaint points to a Georgia statute that makes it unlawful to alter the suspension of a private passenger vehicle used on public roads by more than two inches above or below the factory recommendation, and argues the law exists to protect the public from modifications that harm handling, stability and crash compatibility. A lift of six inches, the suit contends, sits three times beyond that line.

The codified text is more intricate than that summary. The version of Georgia Code Section 40-8-6 published on Justia sets maximum frame heights by weight class, 27 inches for vehicles up to 4,500 pounds gross weight, 30 inches for 4,501 to 7,500 pounds and 31 inches for 7,501 to 14,000 pounds, bars a front-to-rear frame height difference of more than four inches on vehicles rated 4,000 to 7,000 pounds, and makes a violation a misdemeanor. It also states that the section does not apply to a vehicle with an electronic stability control system. How those provisions apply to a modified F-150 is likely to be a point of contention, and the complaint’s own statutory citation was not published in the coverage.

The suit goes on to say Courtesy Ford and the lift-kit defendants owed a continuing duty to warn users, installers, buyers and the public. It argues they knew or should have known that vehicle makers, Ford included, caution against altering suspension geometry and ride height, citing prior crashes, earlier claims, crash testing and industry literature as sources of that knowledge. One passage quoted by Repairer Driven News holds that “aftermarket lift kits defeat, alter, impair, and interfere with OEM-tested crashworthiness performance.”

IIHS crash data on tall pickups and the cars they hit

Crash compatibility, the idea at the heart of the suit, has a research record that predates this case. A February 2025 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found pickups were about 2.5 times as likely as cars to cause deaths among occupants of the car they struck in 2011-16, and just under twice as likely in 2017-22. For pickups above 4,000 pounds, each additional 500 pounds cut the driver’s own death rate by roughly 1 per million registered vehicle years while adding about 7 deaths among occupants of the other car.

Sam Monfort, the IIHS senior statistician who led the work, concluded that an extra-heavy vehicle does not make its own occupants meaningfully safer while making it a bigger danger to other people. The study did not measure lift kits, and it noted that automakers began reshaping front ends in 2009 so bumpers and hoods line up better with car crumple zones. The Holloway complaint argues that an aftermarket lift undoes exactly that factory engineering.

Counsel and docket status in Gwinnett County State Court

The plaintiff is represented by The Cooper Firm, including attorney Rebekah Cooper, according to PickupTruckTalk’s summary of the filing, which stresses that the claims are allegations and that the defendants’ responses were not included in the reporting. No case number or public docket entry has been published in any of the coverage, and the suit does not list a damages figure in the accounts reviewed.

The record so far leaves one fact for the defendants to answer directly: the complaint says a lifted F-150 with a 6-inch kit crossed the center line on Jan. 8, and that the Tundra’s occupant space was breached by the truck’s raised frame rails.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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