Gunmaker subpoenas records of 9 slain at Sandy Hook
NEWTOWN — A gunmaker being sued by nine families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook shootings has subpoenaed the academic, attendance and disciplinary records of five children killed that day. The subpoena included requests for school records of four educators who were killed.
Lawyers for those nine families moved in court Thursday to seal those confidential records of the five slain children and four slain educators because requested by the bankrupted Remington company.
“We have no explanation for why Remington subpoenaed the Newtown Public School District to obtain the kindergarten and firstgrade academic, attendance and disciplinary records of these five school children,” said the families’ lead attorney, Josh Koskoff, after filing a motion to change the protection order in state Superior Court in Waterbury. “The records cannot possibly excuse Remington’s egregious marketing conduct, or be of any assistance in estimating the catastrophic damages in this case. The only relevant part of their attendance records is that they were at their desks on December 14, 2012.”
Dec. 14, 2012, was the day a 20-year-old gunman took his mother’s AR-15-style rifle from an unlocked closet and shot his way into a locked Sandy Hook Elementary
School, killing 20 firstgraders and six educators.
Nine families who lost loved ones sued Remington for wrongful death, claiming the once-powerful gunmaker recklessly marketed a military-grade gun to civilians. Remington argued that it manufactured a legal firearm that was sold lawfully to the gunman’s mother, and that it was the gunman who was responsible for the worst crime in Connecticut history.
In 2016, a state Superior Court judge agreed that Remington was protected under a federal law that
shields the gun industry from most liability when its products are misused. In 2019, the state Supreme Court ruled the families had grounds to pursue an unlawful marketing claim under Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act. Later that year, the United States Supreme Court sent the case back to trial court by refusing to review it.
Since them, Remington has been dissolved in bankruptcy court, and four insurance companies have taken over the former company’s defense.
The battle to keep the
private records of the nine Sandy Hook victims confidential comes as both sides prepare for trial in the highest profile lawsuit of its kind in the country. The lawsuit was in national headlines last in July, when two of Remington’s four insurance companies offered each of the nine families a $3.6 million settlement. The families have yet to respond.
A week before that surprise partial settlement offer, Remington raised eyebrows when it was accused of handing over 18,000 “random cartoons” and 15,000 irrelevant pictures of people go-karting and dirt-biking as part of its pretrial data requested by the families.
On Thursday, Koskoff accused Remington of crossing the line.
“There is no conceivable way that these children’s “application and admission paperwork, attendance records, transcripts, report cards, [and] disciplinary records,” to name only some of the things sought by the subpoena, will assist Remington in its defense, and the (families) do not understand why Remington would invade the families’ privacy with such a request,” Koskoff wrote in a motion filed Thursday. “We have never seen subpoenas directed to first-graders’ educational records, let alone children’s “attendance records,” or “disciplinary records.”
Newtown schools Superintendent Lorrie Rodrigue was not immediately available to comment.
A copy of Remington’s mid-July subpoenas was submitted with the families’ motion on Thursday.
The families’ attorneys asked the judge to remove “protections for Remington’s proprietary information that are now obsolete.”
The reason: Remington no longer exists as a company.
“Remington’s counsel recently conceded: ‘Remington no longer has a proprietary interest in those documents because Remington no longer exists.’ Koskoff writes in the families’ motion. “Counsel is right that Remington is no longer entitled to claim confidentiality for documents it has produced or will produce.”