Walmart sued in Philly in sale of ammo used in killings
Robert Jourdain had been drinking for hours before he walked into a Walmart store early in the morning of July 5 and bought a box of .38-caliber ammunition, court papers say.
Robert Jourdain had been drinking for hours before he walked into a Walmart store early in the morning of July 5 and bought a box of .38-caliber ammunition, court papers say.
Shortly before 3 a.m., Jourdain, then 20, left the Northampton Crossings shopping center in Lower Nazareth Township and got into the white Mercedes Benz sport utility vehicle where Todd West was waiting with a Smith & Wesson revolver. Within an hour, West allegedly used the bullets to kill three people in a random shooting spree on the streets of Easton and Allentown.
The victims' families have filed a lawsuit in Philadelphia against Walmart that one expert says could succeed despite federal protections for gun and ammo dealers. The families claim Walmart and its employees were negligent in selling the ammunition to Jourdain because they should have known he was too young to buy it legally and was mentally impaired by alcohol.
"The bottom line here is that Walmart sold .38-caliber handgun ammunition to an underage person in the middle of the night, and that ammunition was used to kill several people," said Philadelphia attorney Matt Casey, who filed the suit last week.
"Ultimately a jury will decide whether that sale was consummated in a way that breached Walmart's duty to the victims," Casey said.
Killed in the rampage were Kory Ketrow, 22, of Easton, who was shot twice just steps from his Lehigh Street home; and Francine Ramos, 32, and Trevor Gray, 21, both of Allentown, who were attacked as they sat in Ramos' car at Sixth and Greenleaf streets.
Casey filed the suit in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court on behalf of Ketrow's father, Edward Ketrow of Lehighton; Ramos' parents, Jesus Ramos of Slatington and Norma Dolson of Middletown, N.Y.; and Gray's parents, Joseph and Irene Gray of Nazareth. It seeks damages of more than $50,000 for bodily injury, pain and suffering, and wrongful death, plus punitive damages against Walmart.
By failing to take steps to ensure that handgun ammunition was not sold to people who were underage and under the influence of drugs and alcohol, like Jourdain, Walmart violated its duty to the general public, including the victims, the suit claims.
Walmart general manager Nicole Everett, sporting goods manager Addiel Javier and an unknown cashier should have questioned Jourdain and required him to provide identification to show whether he was at least 21, according to the suit filed Dec. 31.
The sale of handgun ammunition to Jourdain violated federal law, the suit says.
A criminal investigation of the killings revealed that Jourdain had been drinking for at least four hours the night of Independence Day into the wee hours of the next morning. The suit says his intoxication was evident in Walmart security videos.
Walmart employees should have known that ammunition sold under those circumstances could result in danger to the public, the suit says.
A spokesman for Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart said the company works to comply with state and federal laws, has a policy of checking IDs for every ammunition purchase and reminds cashiers to do so with prompts that appear on their cash register displays.
Spokesman Randy Hargrove noted that the ammunition at issue in the case can be used in both handguns and rifles. While the law limits the purchase of handgun ammunition to people 21 and older, rifle ammunition can be bought by people 18 and older. He said the company intends to fight the lawsuit.
Although suits seeking to hold gun and ammo dealers responsible for violent crimes are unusual and have rarely been successful, the allegations against Walmart, if true, appear to fit exceptions that could allow the company to be found liable, said Mike McLively, an attorney for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
"Selling to someone who is 20 years old and intoxicated at 3 in the morning is pretty egregious," McLively said.
For the last decade, firearms and ammo dealers have been shielded from liability for crimes committed with guns under a federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that limits when victims of gun violence can sue.
That changed last year, McLively said, when a Wisconsin jury sided with two police officers who were seriously wounded in shootings with a gun purchased illegally at a Milwaukee gun shop, awarding them $6 million.
The officers claimed the Badger Guns employee who sold the weapon was negligent because he failed to recognize warning signs that the man who purchased the gun was buying it for someone else and that it was likely to be used in a crime.
The jury's verdict created a gap in the federal law's protection, making it possible for others harmed in shootings to pursue claims against dealers who don't follow all of the rules, McLively said.
Casey, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit against Walmart, said gun sellers still have substantial protection under federal law, but the facts and context of the case against Walmart are unique in the way that they fit into the exceptions in the law.
"The exception here is that it was an improper sale to a person not of the appropriate age whose presentation at the store, in that it was in the middle of the night and having come from a night of partying, should have alerted Walmart to the fact that it was not a proper sale," Casey said.
Jourdain, now 21, of Easton; West, 23, of Elizabeth, N.J., and their alleged driver, Kareem Mitchell, 23, of Newark, N.J., face trial on charges of homicide and attempted homicide in Lehigh County. Northampton County authorities have agreed to allow the Lehigh County district attorney's office to prosecute the men for all of their alleged crimes, including two shootings in Easton.
West, who faces the death penalty for the killings in Lehigh and Northampton counties, is also charged with killing four people in New Jersey. In addition to the fatal shootings, the men are charged with firing shots at a Palmer Township couple's car as they waited at a traffic light at North Third and Spring Garden streets in Easton, minutes after Ketrow was shot.
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