Wrongful Death (2 page)

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
SIX MONTHS LATER

T
heresa Gonzalez squeezed David Sloane’s biceps as each juror responded to King County Superior Court Judge Anthony Wartnik’s question.

“Is this your verdict?”

“Yes.”

After the twelfth and final juror confirmed her decision, Wartnik adjusted his black-framed glasses, made a few notes, and thanked the members of the jury for their service before dismissing them. Turning, he spoke briefly to the attorneys, complimenting them on having tried a fine case, and for their professional demeanor in his courtroom. Then he, too, stood and left the bench.

Sloane walked to where his young adversary remained slumped in his seat. Frank Martin was not gathering his documents or shoving binders into briefcases. He was not talking to his client, who sat looking just as forlorn in the chair beside him. Martin wasn’t moving at all. Pale, he looked stunned.

Martin looked up at Sloane as if he were from Mars. His client, apparently in no mood to be collegial, shoved back his chair, and
brushed past Sloane, already pulling his cell phone from his pocket. Pacific Northwest Paper had sent the portly plant manager, rather than a corporate officer, to sit through the trial, and the man now bore the unenviable task of telling PNP’s officers exactly why they would have to pay Sloane’s client $1.6 million in damages.

It had not had to come to this. The case should not have gone to trial.

The first day Theresa Gonzalez visited Sloane’s office, she sat across his desk looking like a scared mouse. She told him she was terrified to go to court, that her English was poor and she feared not understanding the judicial system. Her husband, Cesar, had been electrocuted while operating a piece of equipment that had not been properly grounded at a PNP production plant. Cesar had been illegal at the time of his death, his green card long since expired. Theresa feared deportation, not for herself but for their three children. Sloane made sure that wouldn’t happen. Then he gave PNP every opportunity to settle. They had refused.

“You tried a good case, Frank.”

Regaining some color to his cheeks, Martin stood. “Apparently not,” he said.

“Your closing was excellent,” Sloane said. “I thought you had me.”

“So did I.” Martin continued to shake his head in disbelief.

Sloane felt no need to rub the young man’s nose in the verdict, having once been in Martin’s shoes. For thirteen years Sloane had represented similarly arrogant corporate clients in San Francisco before moving to Seattle two years earlier and changing his practice to nearly 100 percent plaintiff’s work. “Juries are unpredictable. You never know what they’ll do.”

Martin eyed Sloane with a sharper focus. “You did.” His eyebrows narrowed. “You said the verdict would be unanimous.”

“I was just—”

“How could you have known that?”

Sloane had made the prediction after PNP’s final refusal to settle at a mediation just before trial. He had hoped his certitude, and his reputation, would convince the company to reconsider. But PNP had remained recalcitrant.

“I was bluffing,” Sloane said.

Martin scoffed. “Remind me not to play poker with you.” He looked to the empty seats in the jury box. “It was as if they forgot all the evidence. You stood to give your closing and they just…forgot everything.”

Martin turned to the doors at the back of the courtroom with a look of dread. PNP’s officers were not the only ones who would be unhappy. Martin would have to explain to the law firm’s partnership board how he had lost a certain victory for a signature client. He looked once more at Sloane, then, with nothing left to say, he gathered his things and packed his briefcases.

Gonzalez stood huddled with her family at the back of the room. As Sloane approached, she stepped forward, still trembling. Tears streaked her cheeks with mascara. No more than five feet, she had to reach up to hug him. “Thank you, David. Thank you for everything.”

He let her cry for a moment. Then she stepped back, and one by one her relatives thanked him, her mother, white-haired and frail, last. The old woman stood on her toes as if to kiss Sloane’s cheek, but when he bent she whispered softly in his ear.

“Usted tiene el regalo. Usted es un curandero.”

She touched his cheek with a wrinkled hand, her brown eyes considering him as they had throughout the trial, not with curiosity, but with a knowing glint. A hint of a smile curled the left side of her mouth and she gave him the briefest of nods.

Sloane led the family to the courtroom doors, taking a moment to explain to Theresa what were likely to be the next steps in the
legal process, including a defense motion for a judgment notwithstanding the verdict, and an attempt to settle the claim for less than the jury amount. Other attorneys had tried the same tactic. They had yet to succeed.

“Judges respect the jury system,” he explained. “They don’t like to overturn a verdict. But don’t think about that now. Just go home and enjoy this,” he said. “We’ll talk further.”

As the family filed out of the courtroom, the mother last, still smiling at him, Sloane let the courtroom door swing shut.

“You have the gift,” she had whispered, using the Mexican term,
un curandero
, referring to a shaman.

Sloane strode back to counsel table to pack his briefcase and felt the fatigue from the long days in the muscles of his legs and lower back. He wanted to get home to Tina and Jake, to think of nothing but a week of lying on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, their first vacation together. He and Tina had honeymooned in Italy after their wedding the previous summer, but because of the move to Seattle—both of them settling into new jobs, Tina trying to get an architectural practice off the ground and Sloane trying to re-create himself as a plaintiff’s lawyer—this would be the first time they took Jake with them for anything more than a day or weekend trip as a family.

The word made him pause.
Family.
The last time Sloane had considered that word was the day he left the fourth and final foster home in which he had been raised in Southern California. Sitting at the kitchen table, his foster father had turned to him in between bites of pot roast to advise that when Sloane turned eighteen he was on his own.

“The money from the state stops then. It’ll be time for you to go figure things out on your own. This family tried to do right by you, but you got to stand on your own now.”

That afternoon Sloane had walked to a hardware store to buy
bolts to fix the Honda motorcycle he’d purchased, and instead found himself inside a marine recruitment center. He enlisted and went through boot camp thinking he’d found in the Corps the family he had never had, but after a while the empty feeling that something remained missing returned, and the camaraderie and brotherhood that had initially filled that hole, no longer could.

Sloane heard the courtroom door swing open and turned, expecting Theresa Gonzalez. An African American woman entered instead. She held a manila file and spoke as she approached.

“Mr. Sloane?”

Sloane had noticed the woman in the courtroom during his closing argument. He estimated her to be late thirties to early forties, an attractive woman in a functional gray-and-black tweed skirt and jacket with her hair pulled back in a tight bun that accentuated high cheekbones and beautiful skin.

“My name is Beverly Ford,” she said.

He detected a subtle hint of perfume. “What can I do for you, Ms. Ford?”

“Adelina Ramirez is a friend of mine,” she said, referring to one of Sloane’s recent clients. Sloane had obtained a jury verdict on behalf of Ramirez and her two daughters after her husband was killed in a construction accident. “She said I need a wrongful-death attorney. She says you’re the best. She says you never lose.”

Sloane deflected the last statement. “Every lawyer loses, Ms. Ford. Nobody wins every case.”

“You do.” Ford spoke with a conviction that indicated she had not just taken a friend at her word. The verdict in the Gonzalez case was his eighteenth jury verdict in a row.

Sloane gestured to the bench behind counsel table. “Tell me how I can help you.”

Ford sat with her knees angled to face him. Her eyes, hazel with traces of yellow that reminded Sloane of sunflowers, regarded him
steadily. “It’s about my husband, James…about what happened to him.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

She took a moment and spoke deliberately. “James was a schoolteacher. He was a schoolteacher…and they went and made him a soldier.” Sloane sensed the story’s direction. “Then they shipped him off to Iraq and he got shot.” She pointed to a spot between her ribs. “He got shot in his side.”

“I’m sorry,” Sloane said, taking a moment to allow her to continue, but Ford sat stoically. “What is it you would like me to do?”

“I want to file a suit, a wrongful-death suit.”

Perplexed, Sloane asked, “Who is it you want to sue?”

“The United States government,” Ford said matter-of-factly. “And the military.”

BEVERLY FORD OPENED
the manila folder and handed Sloane an article clipped from the
New York Times
discussing a confidential report from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner on Marine fatalities in Iraq. The report concluded that a large percentage of those fatalities had been from torso wounds that might have been prevented had the soldiers been wearing new ceramic-plate body armor that the Pentagon had, for two years, largely declined to supply to all troops.

Ford sat twisting her wedding ring and staring into the distance. “The day after he got his letter calling him to active duty, James kept trying to console me. He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, baby. They’re not going to put me on the front lines—that’s for the marines. Besides, I’m going to be riding around in a big old tank. There’s nothing anybody can do to me inside a tank.’” She looked back at Sloane. “Then they put him in a Humvee and sent him to the front lines. Can someone explain that to me? He was sent to
fight the war on terror in an SUV.” Her voice softened. “He was a high school math teacher.”

Sloane knew little about military law and what he did vaguely remember wasn’t encouraging. He seemed to recall from his own service that it was exceedingly difficult for a soldier to sue the government.

“How did your husband get shot?” he asked. “Do you know the circumstances?”

Ford flipped through her file and handed him four multi-page documents. “The military gave me these. They didn’t want to, but I made a Freedom of Information Act request.”

A quick review indicated the documents to be witness statements, apparently from men who served with James Ford the night he died. Sloane thought it curious the military would give up witness statements, even to a surviving relative. In civil litigation, witness statements were rarely produced and normally protected as an attorney’s work product. A FOIA request didn’t change that.

“They awarded James the Purple Heart,” Ford said. “They said he dragged a soldier from a building just before it exploded.” She tapped her finger on the
Times
article. “No one told me about this. I found this out on my own.”

Having been wounded in combat, a Cuban bullet to the shoulder fired from a Kalashnikov rifle during the invasion of Grenada, Sloane knew the military had a claims process for injuries and deaths, though he had not personally used it. “The military has a procedure—” he started, but Ford interrupted him.

“I filed a claim,” she said. “The claims office said if I didn’t get a response within six months I had the right to file a lawsuit in court. I want you to take my case.”

Sloane sought more information. “Why do you think James died because he didn’t have the new body armor?”

“It’s all in there,” she said, tapping the file. “The armor wasn’t adequate, and the military knew it.”

Though it was tragic, Sloane sensed this was a case he could not win, and he did not want to give Ford false hope that he could, his reputation aside. Regardless of what James Ford had been stateside, in Iraq he had been a soldier, and soldiers died in war—too many, always, but it was a sad fact of combat. The difficulty was how to explain that to a widow of one of those soldiers looking to him for help.

“Mrs. Ford, my instincts and experience tell me we’d have a very difficult time proving your husband died because he had inadequate body armor.” He struggled to avoid the legalese while not sounding condescending. “What I mean by that is—”

“I know what you mean,” Ford said. “You don’t think we could prove that even if James had been wearing the new armor he would have lived.”

Sloane nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

Ford regarded him steadily. “James did what was asked of him. He did it without question or complaint. He did it despite having four children at home. He kept his end of the bargain, Mr. Sloane. All I want to know is if the military kept its end of that bargain.”

SLOANE DROVE WEST
on Highway 518 past the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Normally after a trial his thoughts were about all that had gone right. Tonight he could think only of Beverly Ford, a widow with four children, and the steely resolve that had burned in her eyes.

He looked at her file on the passenger seat and wondered if fate, more than Adelina Ramirez, was responsible for bringing Ford to him. He took a hand from the wheel and felt the raised red scar beneath his shirt just above his right pectoral muscle. More than
twenty years later, Sloane could still see the fear in the eyes of the marine sitting across from him on the helicopter transport when the young father of two realized he didn’t have his flak jacket. Just twenty, Ed Venditti carried a photograph of his family inside his helmet. Sloane had no photograph. He had no family. He had no one, no mother or father, no grandparents or aunts or uncles. No wife or child.

“Take mine,” Sloane said, quickly slipping from his jacket.

Venditti resisted.

“Take it.” Sloane dropped the jacket in Venditti’s lap, then stood to disembark before Venditti could argue the matter further. After being shot, Sloane knew the truth would likely get Venditti court-martialed. He told the doctors and his commanding officer that he had taken off his jacket because it made him feel weighted. They thought he was nuts, which prompted a psychiatric exam, whereupon the doctor had concluded: