More than three years after the deadly bridge collapse at Florida International University, the last remaining lawsuit has now been scheduled for a Jan. 10 trial, while separately, prosecutors say they have still not determined whether anyone should be charged criminally.

A civil court judge recently scheduled the trial for the Louis Berger Group, a global engineering firm that had been hired to independently review the bridge design, never noting a fatal design flaw. Berger approved the design plan a little more than one year before the pedestrian bridge collapsed on March 15, 2018, killing six people and injuring 10 others.

The widow of Brandon Brownfield, a motorist killed when the bridge collapsed atop his truck, is seeking compensatory damages from Berger. In a ruling last week, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey also ruled that Chelsea Brownfield’s attorneys can ask a jury for punitive damages — which could dramatically increase the amount of money the family gets if it wins at trial.

“Punitive damages will punish the defendant for wrongful conduct: recklessly taking a job he didn’t have the credentials for, and to deter others from doing the same thing,” said attorney Paul Layne, of Coral Gables’ Silva & Silva, which represents the family.

Attorneys for Berger, run by New Jersey-based engineer Louis Berger, did not return a request for comment.

The unfinished 950-ton bridge collapsed onto Southwest Eighth Street, crushing cars that had been waiting at a red light. It was — before the June Surfside condo collapse — one of the deadliest structural failures in South Florida history.

The collapse spawned a complicated federal investigation, and a slew of lawsuits against the players involved in the construction of the doomed bridge, including the project’s designer, FIGG Bridge Group, and the construction company, Magnum Construction Management, or MCM.

The National Transportation and Safety Board later concluded the “catastrophic failure” stemmed from a flawed design with “significant errors.” The feds also criticized FIU, the Florida Department of Transportation and the project’s design team for lacking judgment and common sense when failing to close the busy road underneath the bridge while a construction crew performed emergency work.

Before the collapse, “abnormal” cracks had been growing and spreading throughout a crucial support junction at the span’s north end, left critically weakened by the major design error, according to the NTSB, which finished its probe in 2019.

Since then, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office and the Miami-Dade police homicide bureau have been finishing the probe, to determine whether the failure to close the road constitutes criminal negligence. Florida law is generally favorable to construction companies after accidents, and legal experts have said a criminal manslaughter case would be challenging.

(A similar probe will be done in the Surfside condo collapse.)

The State Attorney’s Office has declined to talk specifics on when the probe will be complete, or why the decision has taken over three years.

“There are still ongoing matters which may impact our FIU bridge collapse investigation, including pending civil case litigation and potential administrative reviews. As this remains an active investigation, we are not yet at liberty to release any information regarding the direction of this investigation or any final conclusions,” spokesman Ed Griffith said.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle drew criticism shortly after the collapse for telling TV reporters that charges appeared “improbable at this point.” She later defended herself, telling the Miami Herald she was speaking in general about “the complexity of these cases.”

All but one of the lawsuits have since settled out of court. The only remaining case is being pursued by the widow of Brownfield, a father of three who was driving home when his Ford pickup was smashed in the collapse. His truck remained buried in the rubble for days and was the last to be pulled out.

The family’s lawyers are still evaluating how much to ask for when it comes to compensatory and punitive damages.

“We view this as a catastrophic damages case. The Brownfield family was destroyed through no fault of their own,” Layne said. “A widow and three young children are left behind.”

The Berger Group was hired to review FIGG’s design, a novel plan for an expansive concrete deck topped by a broad concrete canopy and connected by a single line of dramatic diagonal concrete trusses. It was designed under the so-called “Accelerated Bridge Construction,” which called for a bridge span to be manufactured on site, then lifted into place over pylons, largely eliminating the need to close a roadway for an extended period of time.

Berger was hired to conduct an “independent peer review,” which the Brownfield family attorneys say should have detected Figg’s doomed design flaws.

But the NTSB’s investigation, as well as civil court depositions, have revealed that the Berger review — conducted by engineer Ayman Shama — was woefully inadequate and never examined the critical “node,” or junction point between the deck and a truss on the north end of the bridge. That’s where cracks eventually formed.

“Shama did not perform any calculations involving the members/connecting trusses of the bridge superstructure,” Judge Bailey wrote in a Sept. 21 order denying Berger’s request to throw out the case.

The firm, NTSB documents revealed, was not even certified to review such a complex design under Florida Department of Transportation rules. “Berger’s certification masked the danger posed by the bridge’s inadequate design, the very danger that its retention as an independent peer reviewer was supposed to reveal,” Judge Bailey wrote.

For his part, Shama told federal investigators that such a broad review would have exceeded “the budget and time agreed about with the designer.”

“In the beginning, I suggested to do this kind of analysis, to analyze the connections,” Shama told federal investigators. “I’m talking about the nodes, or the joints to analyze the connections. However, the budget and time to do this actually was not agreed upon with the designer.”