A northwest Orange County man who suffered severe brain injuries in a 1996 car accident when a seat belt failed was awarded $32.5 million Thursday by a local jury. After a third trial in a long-disputed case, an Orange Circuit Court jury ruled that a restraint-system defect caused the head injury to Mark Force, now 38. It also ruled that Ford Motor Co. and Mazda Motor Corp. -- which designed the seat-belt system for part-owner Ford -- were negligent for failing to warn consumers about the seat-belt defect in the 1993 Ford Escort driven by Force.

"They had five years of warning to do something about this on Ford Escorts and Mercury Tracers but did nothing about it," said one of Force's trial lawyers, Ben Hogan of Birmingham, Ala. Force, then 27, was driving northbound on two-lane Clarcona Road on July 1, 1996, when he was struck head-on by a southbound Ford Mustang that swerved into his lane to pass another vehicle. He was wearing a motorized shoulder belt and a manual lap belt.

Hogan charged that the shoulder belt did not "lock up" and prevent Force's head from being thrown forward, striking a roof post in the left front of the vehicle. The attorney said the shoulder belt lacked a "web grabber" to prevent it from slacking, allowing Force's body to move forward. "In the United States, they [Ford] had 45 complaints before Mark Force's case about the belt not locking up in crashes," Hogan said.