2 more lawsuits filed in Uvalde shooting
UVALDE — A San Francisco Bay Area trial lawyer on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against a gun maker and gun store that sold an assault-style rifle to a gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers here in the second-worst school shooting in American history.
It was the first of two lawsuits attorney Charles Bonner filed Tuesday over the May 24 rampage at Robb Elementary School. Filed in Austin, the 75page federal lawsuit accuses Georgia-based Daniel Defense LLC and Oasis Outback, a gun and sporting goods store in Uvalde, of negligence.
Bonner said in August that he planned to seek $27 billion, which legal experts have dismissed as an amount that would be nearly impossible to recover.
The suit seeks compensatory as well as punitive damages.
The second complaint that Bonner filed Tuesday targeted governmental bodies, such as the city of Uvalde, Uvalde County, the Uvalde school district and police agencies, as well as individual officers — all participants in the botched law enforcement response to the massacre. Authorities waited more than 70 minutes to confront and kill the gunman.
The lawsuit against the gunindustry defendants lists more than two dozen parents, identified only by their first names and the initials of their last names, as plaintiffs on behalf of their children. It also lists 3,000 “Doe” plaintiffs in part because Bonner expects to sign more clients for what is known as a class-action.
The suit chastises the gun companies for marketing assault-style rifles to young people.
Uvalde High School dropout
Salvador Ramos ordered the DDM4 V7, an AR-15 style rifle that he used in the massacre, from Daniel Defense online as soon as he turned 18 early in May. He later picked up the rifle at Oasis Outback, which processed the online sale for Ramos.
“The mass shooting that took place at Robb Elementary was integrally enabled by the illegal, reckless and negligent actions of Defendant Daniel Defense, LLC, which egregiously profited from the unfair marketing of its AR-15 rifles, including the DDM4 V7 rifle that Salvador Ramos obsessed over and ultimately purchased just days after his (18th) birthday,” the suit said.
Daniel Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The suit said Oasis Outback shouldn't have completed the gun transfer to Ramos.
“Despite all the indicia that reasonably raised doubts as to Ramos' fitness to purchase, i.e., a young man dressed head to toe in black attire in Uvalde, Texas, who had expressed an urgency in wanting to purchase thousands of dollars of deadly weaponry within days of his eighteenth birthday,” the lawsuit said, “Outback's owner permitted the purchase to unfold, effectively providing him with an inordinate amount of guns, accessories, and ammunition that should have foreseeably raised significant flags of concern.”
Oasis Outback declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also lists 300 unnamed “Does” as defendants. Using “Doe” is common in civil litigation where a defendant's full name is not yet known.
The lawsuit had been expected for months. A civil rights and environmental law attorney, Bonner had traveled to Uvalde and San Antonio to meet with potential clients while mapping plans for the litigation last summer.
He's not the only lawyer preparing
cases. In September, attorneys Shawn Brown of San Antonio and Stephanie Sherman of Los Angeles-based law firm Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman, filed the first major federal lawsuit on behalf of three families whose children were at the school the day of the mass shooting.
On Monday, yet another suit was filed by San Antonio attorneys David Lopez and Blas Delgado, with help from the legal arm of the group Everytown for Gun Safety. They represent Sandra Torres, who lost a daughter, Eliahna Torres, 10, in the school shooting.
Lopez said recovering monetary damages was not the chief goal of the lawsuit.
“The chief goal for us is transparency and to hold people accountable,” Lopez said. “As you know, we all know, there's been a lot of issues over the past six months trying to figure out simple, reasonable offers in terms of information and we're not even getting that.
“So one of the big, overarching goals for us is transparency and just justice — in general just common decency to help us resolve what's happening or what happened,” he said.
In June, San Antonio lawyer Thomas J. Henry filed a lawsuit in state court against the shooter's estate on behalf of four plaintiffs: Christopher Salinas, Oscar Orona, Cristina Olivarez
and Angelica Rodriguez, parents of four children who were injured in the shooting. The litigation seeks $1 million.
Another lawyer, Mark Dicarlo of Corpus Christi, said he has 17 clients affected by the mass shooting, including Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher wounded by the gunman in classroom 111. Reyes was hospitalized with injuries from the shooting and lost some of his students in the tragedy.
Dicarlo's clients also include Angeli Rose Gomez, who reportedly went around law enforcement officers outside Robb Elementary during the rampage and gathered her two children from their classrooms. Since then, Gomez — who has had prior encounters with Uvalde police — has been harassed by police and threatened with charges for speaking out, Dicarlo alleged.
The lawyer said his fact-finding has been slowed by police agencies and others who say they can't release information because of the Texas Department of Public Safety's criminal investigation into the shooting. DPS may take up to a year before handing its findings to Christina Mitchell Busbee, the district attorney for Uvalde and Real counties, who will decide whether to seek any prosecutions.