speaker-0: But they knew that somebody was probably going to be killed. In my mind, what they did is worthy of a criminal prosecution.
speaker-1: Welcome to Parallel Justice. I'm Renee Williams, the CEO of the National Center for Victims of Crime, and your host for this series. Sometimes the criminal justice system fails to obtain justice for victims. This can occur when prosecutions end in acquittal or if the charges are not filed at all. Even following a conviction, victims of crime can be left with devastating damages. So what then is civil justice? Well, Crime victims can file civil lawsuits against offenders and other responsible parties regardless of the outcome of a criminal prosecution, or even if there was no prosecution at all. While money awarded in civil lawsuits will never fully compensate a victim for their trauma, it can be a valuable resource to help victims of crime rebuild their lives. And it is a powerful incentive to hold institutions, landlords, businessmen, and employers accountable. In this series, we look at civil justice through criminal acts and bring together diverse perspectives to tackle complex questions of accountability, justice, and healing. Parallel Justice is brought to you by the National Crime Victim Bar Association, a program of the National Center for Victims of Crime. More information about the National Center and the National Crime Victim Bar Association is available at victimsofrime.org. ⁓ Please be advised, some of the topics we discuss may be disturbing. This podcast is intended for adult audiences only. While some of these topics may be triggering, we have resources available to help you practice good self-care and seek support. Confidential, compassionate support is available via call, text, or chat at victimconnect.org. The views expressed in the following podcast are those of our guests, who are experts in these areas. Their opinions are invaluable, however, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Center for Victims of Crime. We acknowledge that some of these views may be controversial. However, our goal in these discussions is to raise awareness of victims' rights and the options available to them. Please enjoy the podcast. Mark Llenihan, welcome to Parallel Justice. Today we're going to talk about how a secret crime can be hiding behind an obvious one. And though I really want to jump into that conversation first, I need you to introduce yourself, tell our listeners about yourself and what you do.
speaker-0: Good morning, Renee. Thanks much for having me here today. ⁓ I own a law firm in Dallas and we have a reputation for handling wrongful death cases and 18 wheeler cases and criminally negligent homicide cases all over Texas. But you'll certainly find us fighting for tragedies that happen in other states too. I'm also licensed in a federal court in DC where cases of international terrorism and hostage taking are located. And I'm licensed in North Dakota, but that Part of our practice is really just for big rigs and oil rigs. Near and dear to Parallel Justice's heart, I was elected to serve as the president of the National Crime Victims Bar Association. And I loved every moment of that a few years ago. And then in 2017, the National Center for Victims of Crime asked me to become the permanent chair of the National Compassion Fund, which is an incredible honor.
speaker-1: Mark, you really do a lot for the National Center, and we are so appreciative of that. Now, I said in my intro, we're going to talk about how a secret crime can be hiding behind an obvious one. In this instance, the obvious crime was drunk driving. And nationally, according to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration and our partners at Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 28 people in the US die every day, and around 800 people are injured in. A drunk driving crash.
speaker-0: Yeah. And those numbers are so, so terrible, Renee. And those weren't yearly numbers you just said. Though you said every day. That's twenty eight people every single day means that just while we're talking, somebody who has people that love them somewhere will be killed. And eight hundred injuries a day means that just since we started talking, a few dozen folks have already been injured because of somebody was driving drunk somewhere. It's amazing.
speaker-1: Crazy. And in Texas, where you practice, over 3,600 people are killed in a vehicle collision every year. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the gravity of that. That's 10 people every single day of the year. And the rate of incapacitating injuries is four times.
speaker-0: Well, and you and I have had this conversation before, Renee, how much we hate having to use statistics to describe how severe and the magnitude of a problem is, but it's the only way to do it sometimes. But to really understand what's really lost, you gotta talk about the specifics. Otherwise you just you don't get it.
speaker-1: And that's what we deal with at the National Center every day. It's the specifics that are unique to each person. So we are here today to talk about a specific case, which starts out looking like a combination of those three common statistics. It has driving under the influence, a death, and an incapacitating injury, but it becomes a lot more complex and nefarious.
speaker-0: Yeah, it it is really, really complex, but we're gonna do a a much more simplified version to still it down for today's conversation. And Nefarious is right because it definitely took me to a much darker place than I ever could have guessed on the first day I met with the family. Now that probably makes it sound like it was a unique situation, but once I saw the whole picture, I realized that the only thing unique about the secret crime that was hiding in the background is that I found it. I'm sure that it was killing innocent people then and is killing innocents now. But just that nobody's looking for it. Nobody knows how to find it.
speaker-1: Now you're you're really getting us intrigued, but before we can talk about that secret crime, we probably need to start with the obvious one. So what happened in this case?
speaker-0: Okay, so picture with me. Husband and wife, who are parents of four teenagers, are coming home from their date night. And the highway they were on out there in their part of East Texas is just one lane each way. And it is totally lined with these beautiful pines. And it's it's a big thoroughfare, lots of traffic, and people drive fast. That's how it's set up on the speed limit. Coming the other way is a 26-year-old who goes by the name of Junior, and he's driving a pickup and he's driving kind of angry. And he doesn't like the way the person in front of him is driving. So he tries to pass that person, but instead of passing successfully, he hits the husband and wife head on. And that collision is so, so violent that even though the husband and wife are in a larger vehicle, the whole thing gets sent flying and lands upside down with lots and lots of crush damage. Now there's several witnesses who stop and rush to help. And I gotta tell you, Renee, that's really, really rare. As much as I hate to say it, way more people keep on driving than ever stop to help. So these people are amazing people. Now, when these Samaritans get to the upside down vehicle, they see the husband and wife inside, both hanging upside down. But when they see the wife, she is so shattered that they all think she was already killed in the collision. So they spend their time trying to help the husband, who is totally uninjured, except that he's trapped. He's hanging upside down, trapped. And so they are trying to work on freeing the husband, but the husband won't have any of it. He makes them stop and he makes them go get his wife out before he lets them try to help him. So they do that. They break the window out of the car and they drag her from the area. And while this is all happening, she's regaining consciousness and she sees the same thing that the husband sees and that the Samaritans are seeing, which is that there's a fire starting in the vehicle's engine. And the wife. Tries to go help her husband get free, but all of her limbs have been broken. So she can't do anything. She's completely helpless. And as the fire is getting hotter and hotter, it's pushing away the Samaritans who are there trying to help the husband, except for this one young fellow who is using his pocket knife to try to free the husband. Who remember, he's not injured, he's just trapped. And when the flames get too, too hot, the husband actually tells the Samaritan this. He says, Son, God put you on this planet to save my wife's life today. You did that. You can't help me. Go see if you can help the other fellow now. Now, every single time I I try to repeat those words, it upsets me. But the people who knew him aren't surprised by it in the slightest because by all accounts, he was one of the greatest people that ever lived. He would write these letters, Renee. To his wife and his children that were so overwhelmingly beautiful, it was hard to believe that they were written in real life and not for a movie. They're just amazing things.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. Well, you just proved the point we were making before. Every one of these cases is a tragedy. And each of these tragedies is their own personal, terrible, heart-wrenching story, way more than the statistics would tell us. But you were there as a lawyer, and you have the job of trying to find a way to help this family. As a legal case, what does this look like to you?
speaker-0: And and I wasn't the first lawyer they talked here now. I was probably the third or fourth. And the family had told me what all the other lawyers said that they saw, which was the same thing that I was saying, which was it looked like Junior, who had been previously busted for drinking and driving, was drunk at the time, that he caused this collision. And because he was a modestly paid laborer for a construction company, that he would never have enough money to be able to pay for for even the wife's air ambulance bill. It was just. you know, exorbitant medical bills as you can imagine. And he had he had nothing to help him with. So it it looked bad. It looked like there wasn't gonna be much way to help him at all.
speaker-1: This was a car accident, so surely he had insurance.
speaker-0: He did have insurance and the Texas minimum at the time, which is what seventy-five percent of Texans have, as the minimum, it was twenty-five thousand for the husband and twenty-five thousand dollars for the wife. And that doesn't go very far in this kind of situation.
speaker-1: No, it doesn't. So what do you do when you're facing these bills as the lawyer when there's no insurance?
speaker-0: Yeah, we go through a little checklist in our head and we look to see if other people are involved that also have responsibility. In Junior's case, let's say he had gotten drunk at a bar. Perhaps we could have sued the bar. ⁓ but though he was drinking, he wasn't drunk this night, and he did his drinking at home, not at a bar. So that avenue wasn't going to help the family. If we think that the vehicle should have protected the husband and wife better, we might consider suing the maker of the vehicle. But The collision in this one was so, so forceful that if the husband and wife were doing 60 and junior was doing 80, that's 140 mile an hour collision. There's no way ⁓ we expect a vehicle to protect everybody at that kind of force. It's just only so much you can ask a vehicle to do. So that angle wasn't gonna help us. And we looked to see if junior was working. And in this case, no, he wasn't. This was a Saturday evening. He hadn't worked at all that day and he had the whole weekend off. So that wasn't gonna help us.
speaker-1: Did he own the truck?
speaker-0: It was his truck. He had got it six months before this. If his employer had owned it, then we could have tried to get the employer's insurance for the family, but six months it had been his truck.
speaker-1: So what do you tell the family who's facing all of this and who clearly needs help?
speaker-0: All of the other lawyers who they spoke with told them to take the minimum insurance, the $50,000, and be done with it, to move on. And the truth is, I didn't have any ideas on how to help them any better than any of those prior folks did. But I told them I would try to find a way. But I didn't have a single idea that I liked at that time.
speaker-1: So how do you start? What gets you moving in the right direction?
speaker-0: So the first clue, again, this is a simplified version of the battle, but the first clue for us was, well, it's what you touched on. It's you know who owned the pickup truck? ⁓ that was exactly the right question. And I said he had owned for six months. But because I didn't know where to look, I decided we were gonna look everywhere. And so we looked everywhere we could. One of those places was to see who owned it before Junior did. And there were three things about the way Junior acquired his pickup truck that seemed like I needed to think a lot more about.
speaker-1: Okay, now I'm intrigued. What was the first thing?
speaker-0: Okay, so the prior owner was the construction company that Junior worked for. That was the first thing. So the construction company he worked for was owned by his father, Junior's father, senior.
speaker-1: And the second thing. And so what was the last thing?
speaker-0: Junior never bought the pickup truck. Instead, the company CPA prepped the title transfer as a flat out gift from the company to Junior.
speaker-1: So leaving behind the tax implications, what can because we're not here to talk about that, what
speaker-0: What conclusion did you draw from that? Well, you you went right to where my mind went, which was is this some sort of tax dodge? Maybe they were just trying to figure out a way to get money to the sun and cheaper way than than just handing them the money. But I didn't know what it meant. All I knew is that it was weird. And I have zero expertise in anything tax based. So all I was left with at that point was just a weird feeling that there was something going on back here. And I wanted to explore the idea of the tax dodge, but I didn't really know what good that would do.
speaker-1: So why did they say they gave Junior the
speaker-0: truck. They had the best of all reasons, which is they said he was awesome. He was an awesome employee and an awesome person. And that he ⁓ you know, very well deserved of the bonus.
speaker-1: I think I'm an awesome person and I think I'm an awesome employee. People don't give me trucks, but I guess that makes sense.
speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ it was it was a very plausible explanation. That's why you would give somebody big old bonuses. The problem was that we had talked to former employees of the construction company who had worked with junior. And we talked to former employees who worked with junior at other places. And they did not describe working with junior as being awesome. They didn't think he was an awesome employee. They didn't think he was an awesome person. They said the opposite. They said that if you were around him for any length of time at all, Soon enough, you'd want to punch him. And that's a pretty extreme way to describe how somebody makes you feel. And get a load of this. So every time we talked to a former employee, we'd ask them if they had ever been given a truck or if they've ever been given a big bonus for being awesome. And not a single one, not a single former employee ever said, Yeah, yeah, that happened to me, or I even heard of it happening to anybody else. Nobody ever said they'd ever heard.
speaker-1: Shocking. I I was gonna ask you for the construction company's name and phone number if that was what they were regularly giving as bonuses. How big was this company?
speaker-0: Well, construction companies go up and down based on how much work is out there in the world. But when this one was busy, it would be up to a hundred people. And construction companies with a hundred people go through a lot of trucks.
speaker-1: And just for perspective for me, is 100 people big for a construction company? Is that small? Is that average sized?
speaker-0: There's just a million different kinds of construction companies. There's gonna be some which are just a few people and some which are thousands. So this is pretty substantial. They would get big gigs. They would work for government projects all over Texas.
speaker-1: Okay. So where do you go to next?
speaker-0: So we decided to see if the construction company had ever ever given or sold another pickup truck to any other employee. ⁓ because we like said, the former employees that we talked to said they'd never heard of it. We want to know had it ever happened any other time other than what you.
speaker-1: How do you go about finding those details?
speaker-0: It was nothing but 100% elbow grease. We ordered the title history for every vehicle the company had ever owned, which was a mountainous pile of paper. And I read every single page looking for a clip.
speaker-1: And you do all that in discovery or were you in pre-discovery?
speaker-0: We didn't really want the other side to know what we were looking for. So we got all these records directly from the government without telling them what we were looking for.
speaker-1: ⁓ that's brilliant. So what did you find?
speaker-0: All right. So imagine the sequence that would show up on Junior's truck's history. First it would say that it was owned by the company, and then it was owned by Junior, and then it was owned by the insurance company that got the salvage because the thing was destroyed in the collision. So employer and then employee and then insurance company. That'd be the sequence. Now going through this haystack of government documents, one other vehicle had ever gone from employer to employee before. Just one. We're gonna call that that employee Daniel. Now that caught my eye for sure, but what really blew me away were two of the details. First, Daniel gets that truck at pretty much the same time Junior got his truck. And second, and this is crazy weird to me at the time, where Junior totaled his truck six months after getting it. The truck that went to Daniel was totaled in just four weeks. So employer, then employee, then four weeks later, it's owned by an insurance company. So the exact same flow chart as junior struck.
speaker-1: This leads to so many questions, but but could you find out why Daniel's truck was
speaker-0: totaled. Well, we had to find out. We had to know. So we went looking for the crash report for Daniel. And we see the one there where the truck is total. We can tell by the date that that's what it is. But, you know, like a neon light, we see one on there that was he was involved in a prior collision, a little bit from before when the truck was given him in the first place. So we asked the state of Texas to send us both those records. And we got them.
speaker-1: So we've got two collisions with two company trucks. What was the older one?
speaker-0: So the older one, the one from before, was a strange document that said that Daniel caused an accident in Austin when he had a seizure. Now we wanted to know the whole story behind that. So I hop the car and I drive down to Austin and I talked to every single person who saw what happened the day of the seizure. And it turned out to be a big incident. So picture the seizure coming over Daniel. He bounces all over an intersection in Austin, totally out of control. And a school crossing guard even has to rush to pull half a dozen kids out of the way. of this vehicle that's going everywhere because Daniel can't control himself. He's just totally overcome by the seizure.
speaker-1: This was a confirmed seizure? Okay. Was he on the job at that time?
speaker-0: Yes, it was. Time. He was on the job at that time. He had just picked up fuel for the company and he was delivering it to the work site.
speaker-1: Okay, so even though it's not a company car, it's his personal car that's been gifted to him, his employer, the c this construction company, is still gonna find out that this incident happened.
speaker-0: Well, yeah, they will find out. This was the vehicle he was in before he was given one. So this was a company vehicle back then. And the company was absolutely can find out about it because if you think about it, their insurance was gonna have to pay for all the damage that it caused at the intersection. Now, of course, how that works is the insurance company will write a check for the damage, but it's not done then. It it then, you know, turns to ⁓ the construction company and it sends them a bill and it says, all right. It's your turn now to write us a check 'cause you got to pay for your deductible.
speaker-1: Course. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have had to pay deductibles. I know that I've had to pay deductibles.
speaker-0: Okay, but this part's gonna blow your mind, Renee. The day the CPA wrote the check to his own insurance company for the deductible on Daniel's seizure caused accident was the exact same day that the CPA handed the pickup truck to Junior. Wait.
speaker-1: At at this point, so many questions, but all new ones.
speaker-0: Yeah, before I was wondering about, you know, possible tax dodge, even though I didn't know if that was going to help me. Now I was wondering if Junior, like Daniel, who had the seizure problem, had a health problem that made him a high risk driver. Daniel had the seizure disorder. Did Junior have a health problem, something along those same lines? So think about the inconsistent stories we've been told about Junior. The employer said he was this awesome fellow, but former coworkers all said, He'd make you want to punch it. Yeah. Try to figure out what was what. And we had about a hundred different things we had to do to get the real story. When we finally got the authoritative medical records, we saw that junior had been diagnosed with a whole raft of mental illnesses, all of which seemed to be more, they seemed to me like they would make it hard for him to exercise good judgment reliably, including one of his diagnoses was for something called rage disorder. I remember the moment before I had on collision on the highway, he was trying to go around another driver because he didn't like the way the other driver was driving.
speaker-1: he was at his car in the first place because he was having a fight with his wife. How can you tell how severe this problem is for Junior? I it's hard to get somebody's psychological records, even in discovery.
speaker-0: It's crazy hard. Rightfully, courts protect the privacy of our trying to get mental health care. But we had a thought of a way that we could illustrate how severe his judgment was. I got to ask Junior about it. So when we when we saw that Junior had connections in several other states, we went looking in those other states to see if he had any collisions in them. And he did. What was crazy was that he had a collision after this in Florida. Having a collision after this one is really hard to fathom because imagine he is actually waiting for his criminal trial. The judge has said, listen, son, you don't have to wait in jail, but you got to follow my rules. And because I very well may sentence you for decades, you know, functionally the rest of your life, I expect you to follow my rules because you don't want to make me angry when it comes time to sentencing. You're being accused of this vehicular homicide. So here's my rules. You do not get to drive until your trial. And you cannot leave the state of Texas. All right. So those are pretty clear rules. And nevertheless, we find this police report saying that he got in an accident in a whole other state. That's that's amazing. Even with the trial ahead of him, he could not resist the temptation to do what his urges were telling him to do, which was get in the car, defy the judge's orders. drive poorly in a whole other state. And to make it even more of an extreme scenario, when he gets in this Florida collision, his wife was with him. All he had to do was to avoid the worst part of this, him being behind the wheel, causing another collision, was just have her drive. If he had simply left Texas and not caused any harm, that's a very different story than causing another accident in violation of the judge's orders. So with that Harris in my head, I'm like, my gosh, how impossible was it for Junior To ever exercise reasonable judgment.
speaker-1: Was he drunk in the Florida accident? No. So Daniel's health problem was that he might have a seizure. Junior's health problem is leaving him completely unable to resist whatever impulses come to his mind.
speaker-0: Very different causes of the exact same consequence. Neither of these young men, Daniel or Junior, could simply decide to be a safe driver. Daniel couldn't stop a seizure from happening, and nothing Junior did could make him make sound judgment decisions. It wasn't in his program. They didn't have the ability to do that by as a matter of decision.
speaker-1: And I think there was a critical part of your story where there were the transfer of two pickups from this company. And I I want you to paint the scene that you were envisioning there, because I know that's a crucial detail and I want to hear about it.
speaker-0: Yeah, so what I was picturing, I actually got to talk to Senior, the owner, about in person. I laid out for him exactly what I was picturing. Once I had all these parts in my head, I confronted him when he was under oath. And the truth is, I got him trapped by all the facts. And once he was trapped into confessing all these details about Daniel and the seizure in Austin and everything else, he confessed that, yeah, he, the CPA, and Daniel. Did this whole move with Daniel's pickup truck just to hide the fact that Daniel, this incredibly dangerous employee, was driving all over Texas in a company truck. Now, he did not confess that Junior's truck was done for the same reason. He maintained straight out that Junior was always awesome and he did not have any problems with the way Junior drove. But he did reveal that the day they decided to give Daniel the truck. They had a conversation about that. And it was the exact same conversation where they decided to give Junior the truck. And though Senior denied that he considered Junior to be dangerous, the way that he saw Daniel debate, I never doubted it after I got the confession about Daniel. In fact, one of the people who actually did punch Junior in the face when Junior made him so angry was the dad, Junior's father. And he got prosecuted for that. So This whole story about he was awesome and everybody loved him was so demonstrably true that somebody's father punched him in the face.
speaker-1: His own father and the company owner was the one that punched him. Yeah. So what happened to everybody in this?
speaker-0: Well, once we got that confession, the case wrapped up then. And Daniel did get in that second collision. And like the first one, it was because of a seizure, but he didn't hurt anybody in that time. He just took out a fence. And you would think that the second collision through Daniel and Junior's tragedy would have stopped them from letting Daniel drive, but they actually let him drive for a whole nother year, a whole nother year longer after that. The construction company, once we got the confession, ⁓ I was able to force them to sell the entire company to a different construction company that was far more responsible. Junior was sentenced to jail before I got the confession. And if I recall correctly, he got a 20-year sentence. And when I spoke with him there, I told him, Junior, even though I represent the family, I don't think you belong here. Now I didn't want him out free either. I wanted him somewhere where he could get the help with his mental illnesses that he needed. Now, as for the owner and the CPA, they lost their business, but they were never prosecuted. And I think that is a travesty. The way I see it, they looked at their workforce and asked themselves, who is most likely to kill themselves and who is most likely to kill somebody else? And correctly, they picked Daniel and Junior. I mean, in four weeks, Daniel had the second collision. In six months, Junior caused this unbelievable nightmare. Their prediction was incredibly accurate. The owner and the CPA knew that they were probably arranging a future homicide. They didn't know if it was an employee, if it was Junior, their son, dad's son, or if it was some married couple on day night who would be killed. But they knew that somebody was probably going to be killed. And that when that happened, they didn't want anybody realizing that their employees were really driving company trucks. That they'd simply disguised as personal trucks with this little tricky paperwork move of theirs. So in my mind, what they did is worthy of a criminal prosecution. And that is, for me, the secret crime hiding behind the obvious one. Junior couldn't help what he did, but these people calculated exactly what they did.
speaker-1: Amazing. Did Daniel have any wherewithal to realize he should not be driving? Or did he ever mention that he said to the owners maybe I shouldn't drive?
speaker-0: Yeah, let's let's contrast Daniel and Junior here. And I'm gonna tell you another one of Junior's diagnoses. He had a diagnosis called narcissism disorder, which means that when somebody told him he was an awesome employee, he believed it. And they did tell him that when they gave him the truck. Junior, you're an awesome employee. Here's your truck. He had no sense of perspective on all the problems he caused and that he was not an awesome employee. So he absolutely believed it. He did not know that he was a pawn in this scheme. Daniel, on the other hand, did know. But when you are, you know, a young fellow in East Texas and you now can't drive legally because you have this seizure disorder, you have very little power to do anything. So when the boss says, Daniel, this is how we're going to do this so you can keep your job, we're going to hand you the truck and you're going to pretend it's yours, that's what you do, because you need a job.
speaker-1: ⁓ my, but he knew that he was not fit to be driving. Well no, he he did not actually because he had he was a narcissist.
speaker-0: He thought he could do everything great. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: What happened to this family?
speaker-0: the family is every bit as beautiful as the husband was. And they are still very, very important to me. I've attended two weddings for the kids. I helped one kid get into law school. And they came to surprise birthday party that my wife threw for me a couple of years ago. They're amazing.
speaker-1: So you stayed close. That's awesome. How how did this lawsuit help them?
speaker-0: Well, we got well over a hundred times what anybody thought we could get. And though that was nowhere near what they deserved, it was literally every penny available. And when we signed all the paperwork on that, though I was required to keep lots of details secret, I expressly included in that document that I'm allowed to teach any practicing lawyer every detail of the case with my files completely open. And I promised the family that I would never give up on teaching other lawyers about it. So that they could spot this homicidal scheme, which like as I said, I'm sure has killed countless innocents and I think is still killing innocents.
speaker-1: Do you think this practice, ⁓ this conspiracy is commonplace amongst companies?
speaker-0: I think it's worse than I painted because the only reason I caught them is because I got lucky and they created a paper trail for me and having the truck go directly from the company to junior. If they had just handed him a $5,000 bonus and then told him, you're taking this money and you're buying this piece of junk ⁓ truck that is waiting for you at the used car lot. with ball tires and you know ⁓ everything else that's wrong with it. How would I ever seen that? It would have been completely invisible to me and it would have been impossible to ever find that connection. And the incentive would have been to buy the most dangerous truck out there, one with no decent brakes, no tires, every every mechanical problem, because that's how you can do it cheapest. So they're incentivized to do this exact same scheme, but just with the one step in between of Doing it with cash and giving them express instructions on what they're going to do with it. And that's how they can separate on paper that people are driving for the companies when they're not, when it doesn't look like they are. And here's where this whole thing came from. So I mentioned that the CPA did the paperwork. Before he went to work for this construction company, he worked for a massive business. And I could see that one of the zillions of things this massive business did was risk management. Risk management means insurance. When you ever hear that, it's just a euphemism for insurance. Now, that he worked somewhere in this company that does risk management, doesn't know that doesn't mean he knew anything about risk management. So I again started calling employees of that company. And I said, hey, who knows this fellow? And what about his department that he was in? Like, ⁓ yeah, yeah. That was the risk management department. So He left this company that advises people on how to handle insurance and immediately put this trick to use when he got to a place where he was being paid to do so. So it's probably absolutely everywhere.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. Now did this case set precedents in Texas?
speaker-0: It did not go up on appeal. So it's not the kind of case you're gonna read about in those books that always appear ⁓ you know, on the TV shows. But I've been asked to lecture on this case and I've done it, gosh, in Miami and Chicago and Vegas and everywhere I can I go and and try to teach the details of this because it's it's hard to be a lawyer and to even look for the stuff. It's just not the way our practices are designed that we can spend enough time and money to dig through hundreds of thousands of pages trying to put together these little nuances. I mean, we've covered it in these few minutes, but it was I'm not nearly as smart as as it sounds because it took me four years to put this together. And it was, it was a bloody knuckles four years trying to get all the parts to come together in my head.
speaker-1: What key takeaways do you have for the general public? What are the important lessons learned? And what would you tell folks who might be in this situation or think they are?
speaker-0: Hard to say this without being little bit critical of ⁓ the nature of my practice. The every single lawyer you call, whether they're an injury lawyer or not, if you tell them that you lost a loved one to a drunk driver, they're gonna make you their client. Everybody thinks that drunk driving cases are easy money. And they are. Any one of those lawyers that talked to the family could have closed the case for $50,000 with a phone call. And Turning $50,000 into a phone call ⁓ is that's a great investment. Nobody gets paid that much for five minutes work. The problem is that if we don't look deeper and we don't try to find out what's really, really going on, then these things can multiply and they become good business decisions. This was a good business decision for the CPA and the construction company, except they got caught. The only reason they had to sell their company was because they got caught. And that takes a lot of work. So you need to find a lawyer who is willing to look deeper into why somebody was killed in a drunk driving accident. Was it it came from a bar? Was there really a hidden employment connection? Heck, were they driving for Uber? Were they driving for Grubhub? Was there something wrong with one of the vehicles that that led to these deaths? It's it's hard to do. I guess the the best rule of thumb is to not hire a lawyer who's got a billboard. You need to find somebody who only has a few cases who can be neurotic and dig into these things in this in the kind of detail that it requires.
speaker-1: Great advice and what an amazing case and just intriguing. Thank you so much, Mark, for joining us today to discuss this. We are going to put the details for your law firm in the show notes page. So I'd like to encourage all of our listeners to check out those show notes so that you can find Mark. Thank you again for joining us and unpacking this. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of Parallel Justice.
speaker-0: Thanks so much, Renee.
speaker-1: Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. Again, we know the topics discussed can be difficult and may be emotionally triggering. Support is available at victimconnect.org through call, text, or chat. We encourage you to take time today to learn about your rights and options that are available to you. Building safer communities requires every one of us to take action. Visit victimsofrime.org to learn more. And check out our show notes for today's speakers' information. This podcast was created by the National Center for Victims of Crime in partnership with our center and affiliate, the National Crime Victim Bar Association, the nation's first professional association of attorneys and expert witnesses dedicated to helping victims seek justice through the civil justice system. To support this podcast, please visit victimsofrime.org/slash donate. Parallel Justice is produced by the National Center for Victims of Crime and written and hosted by me, Renee Williams.
speaker-1: Welcome to Parallel Justice. I'm Renee Williams, the CEO of the National Center for Victims of Crime, and your host for this series. Sometimes the criminal justice system fails to obtain justice for victims. This can occur when prosecutions end in acquittal or if the charges are not filed at all. Even following a conviction, victims of crime can be left with devastating damages. So what then is civil justice? Well, Crime victims can file civil lawsuits against offenders and other responsible parties regardless of the outcome of a criminal prosecution, or even if there was no prosecution at all. While money awarded in civil lawsuits will never fully compensate a victim for their trauma, it can be a valuable resource to help victims of crime rebuild their lives. And it is a powerful incentive to hold institutions, landlords, businessmen, and employers accountable. In this series, we look at civil justice through criminal acts and bring together diverse perspectives to tackle complex questions of accountability, justice, and healing. Parallel Justice is brought to you by the National Crime Victim Bar Association, a program of the National Center for Victims of Crime. More information about the National Center and the National Crime Victim Bar Association is available at victimsofrime.org. ⁓ Please be advised, some of the topics we discuss may be disturbing. This podcast is intended for adult audiences only. While some of these topics may be triggering, we have resources available to help you practice good self-care and seek support. Confidential, compassionate support is available via call, text, or chat at victimconnect.org. The views expressed in the following podcast are those of our guests, who are experts in these areas. Their opinions are invaluable, however, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Center for Victims of Crime. We acknowledge that some of these views may be controversial. However, our goal in these discussions is to raise awareness of victims' rights and the options available to them. Please enjoy the podcast. Mark Llenihan, welcome to Parallel Justice. Today we're going to talk about how a secret crime can be hiding behind an obvious one. And though I really want to jump into that conversation first, I need you to introduce yourself, tell our listeners about yourself and what you do.
speaker-0: Good morning, Renee. Thanks much for having me here today. ⁓ I own a law firm in Dallas and we have a reputation for handling wrongful death cases and 18 wheeler cases and criminally negligent homicide cases all over Texas. But you'll certainly find us fighting for tragedies that happen in other states too. I'm also licensed in a federal court in DC where cases of international terrorism and hostage taking are located. And I'm licensed in North Dakota, but that Part of our practice is really just for big rigs and oil rigs. Near and dear to Parallel Justice's heart, I was elected to serve as the president of the National Crime Victims Bar Association. And I loved every moment of that a few years ago. And then in 2017, the National Center for Victims of Crime asked me to become the permanent chair of the National Compassion Fund, which is an incredible honor.
speaker-1: Mark, you really do a lot for the National Center, and we are so appreciative of that. Now, I said in my intro, we're going to talk about how a secret crime can be hiding behind an obvious one. In this instance, the obvious crime was drunk driving. And nationally, according to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration and our partners at Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 28 people in the US die every day, and around 800 people are injured in. A drunk driving crash.
speaker-0: Yeah. And those numbers are so, so terrible, Renee. And those weren't yearly numbers you just said. Though you said every day. That's twenty eight people every single day means that just while we're talking, somebody who has people that love them somewhere will be killed. And eight hundred injuries a day means that just since we started talking, a few dozen folks have already been injured because of somebody was driving drunk somewhere. It's amazing.
speaker-1: Crazy. And in Texas, where you practice, over 3,600 people are killed in a vehicle collision every year. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the gravity of that. That's 10 people every single day of the year. And the rate of incapacitating injuries is four times.
speaker-0: Well, and you and I have had this conversation before, Renee, how much we hate having to use statistics to describe how severe and the magnitude of a problem is, but it's the only way to do it sometimes. But to really understand what's really lost, you gotta talk about the specifics. Otherwise you just you don't get it.
speaker-1: And that's what we deal with at the National Center every day. It's the specifics that are unique to each person. So we are here today to talk about a specific case, which starts out looking like a combination of those three common statistics. It has driving under the influence, a death, and an incapacitating injury, but it becomes a lot more complex and nefarious.
speaker-0: Yeah, it it is really, really complex, but we're gonna do a a much more simplified version to still it down for today's conversation. And Nefarious is right because it definitely took me to a much darker place than I ever could have guessed on the first day I met with the family. Now that probably makes it sound like it was a unique situation, but once I saw the whole picture, I realized that the only thing unique about the secret crime that was hiding in the background is that I found it. I'm sure that it was killing innocent people then and is killing innocents now. But just that nobody's looking for it. Nobody knows how to find it.
speaker-1: Now you're you're really getting us intrigued, but before we can talk about that secret crime, we probably need to start with the obvious one. So what happened in this case?
speaker-0: Okay, so picture with me. Husband and wife, who are parents of four teenagers, are coming home from their date night. And the highway they were on out there in their part of East Texas is just one lane each way. And it is totally lined with these beautiful pines. And it's it's a big thoroughfare, lots of traffic, and people drive fast. That's how it's set up on the speed limit. Coming the other way is a 26-year-old who goes by the name of Junior, and he's driving a pickup and he's driving kind of angry. And he doesn't like the way the person in front of him is driving. So he tries to pass that person, but instead of passing successfully, he hits the husband and wife head on. And that collision is so, so violent that even though the husband and wife are in a larger vehicle, the whole thing gets sent flying and lands upside down with lots and lots of crush damage. Now there's several witnesses who stop and rush to help. And I gotta tell you, Renee, that's really, really rare. As much as I hate to say it, way more people keep on driving than ever stop to help. So these people are amazing people. Now, when these Samaritans get to the upside down vehicle, they see the husband and wife inside, both hanging upside down. But when they see the wife, she is so shattered that they all think she was already killed in the collision. So they spend their time trying to help the husband, who is totally uninjured, except that he's trapped. He's hanging upside down, trapped. And so they are trying to work on freeing the husband, but the husband won't have any of it. He makes them stop and he makes them go get his wife out before he lets them try to help him. So they do that. They break the window out of the car and they drag her from the area. And while this is all happening, she's regaining consciousness and she sees the same thing that the husband sees and that the Samaritans are seeing, which is that there's a fire starting in the vehicle's engine. And the wife. Tries to go help her husband get free, but all of her limbs have been broken. So she can't do anything. She's completely helpless. And as the fire is getting hotter and hotter, it's pushing away the Samaritans who are there trying to help the husband, except for this one young fellow who is using his pocket knife to try to free the husband. Who remember, he's not injured, he's just trapped. And when the flames get too, too hot, the husband actually tells the Samaritan this. He says, Son, God put you on this planet to save my wife's life today. You did that. You can't help me. Go see if you can help the other fellow now. Now, every single time I I try to repeat those words, it upsets me. But the people who knew him aren't surprised by it in the slightest because by all accounts, he was one of the greatest people that ever lived. He would write these letters, Renee. To his wife and his children that were so overwhelmingly beautiful, it was hard to believe that they were written in real life and not for a movie. They're just amazing things.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. Well, you just proved the point we were making before. Every one of these cases is a tragedy. And each of these tragedies is their own personal, terrible, heart-wrenching story, way more than the statistics would tell us. But you were there as a lawyer, and you have the job of trying to find a way to help this family. As a legal case, what does this look like to you?
speaker-0: And and I wasn't the first lawyer they talked here now. I was probably the third or fourth. And the family had told me what all the other lawyers said that they saw, which was the same thing that I was saying, which was it looked like Junior, who had been previously busted for drinking and driving, was drunk at the time, that he caused this collision. And because he was a modestly paid laborer for a construction company, that he would never have enough money to be able to pay for for even the wife's air ambulance bill. It was just. you know, exorbitant medical bills as you can imagine. And he had he had nothing to help him with. So it it looked bad. It looked like there wasn't gonna be much way to help him at all.
speaker-1: This was a car accident, so surely he had insurance.
speaker-0: He did have insurance and the Texas minimum at the time, which is what seventy-five percent of Texans have, as the minimum, it was twenty-five thousand for the husband and twenty-five thousand dollars for the wife. And that doesn't go very far in this kind of situation.
speaker-1: No, it doesn't. So what do you do when you're facing these bills as the lawyer when there's no insurance?
speaker-0: Yeah, we go through a little checklist in our head and we look to see if other people are involved that also have responsibility. In Junior's case, let's say he had gotten drunk at a bar. Perhaps we could have sued the bar. ⁓ but though he was drinking, he wasn't drunk this night, and he did his drinking at home, not at a bar. So that avenue wasn't going to help the family. If we think that the vehicle should have protected the husband and wife better, we might consider suing the maker of the vehicle. But The collision in this one was so, so forceful that if the husband and wife were doing 60 and junior was doing 80, that's 140 mile an hour collision. There's no way ⁓ we expect a vehicle to protect everybody at that kind of force. It's just only so much you can ask a vehicle to do. So that angle wasn't gonna help us. And we looked to see if junior was working. And in this case, no, he wasn't. This was a Saturday evening. He hadn't worked at all that day and he had the whole weekend off. So that wasn't gonna help us.
speaker-1: Did he own the truck?
speaker-0: It was his truck. He had got it six months before this. If his employer had owned it, then we could have tried to get the employer's insurance for the family, but six months it had been his truck.
speaker-1: So what do you tell the family who's facing all of this and who clearly needs help?
speaker-0: All of the other lawyers who they spoke with told them to take the minimum insurance, the $50,000, and be done with it, to move on. And the truth is, I didn't have any ideas on how to help them any better than any of those prior folks did. But I told them I would try to find a way. But I didn't have a single idea that I liked at that time.
speaker-1: So how do you start? What gets you moving in the right direction?
speaker-0: So the first clue, again, this is a simplified version of the battle, but the first clue for us was, well, it's what you touched on. It's you know who owned the pickup truck? ⁓ that was exactly the right question. And I said he had owned for six months. But because I didn't know where to look, I decided we were gonna look everywhere. And so we looked everywhere we could. One of those places was to see who owned it before Junior did. And there were three things about the way Junior acquired his pickup truck that seemed like I needed to think a lot more about.
speaker-1: Okay, now I'm intrigued. What was the first thing?
speaker-0: Okay, so the prior owner was the construction company that Junior worked for. That was the first thing. So the construction company he worked for was owned by his father, Junior's father, senior.
speaker-1: And the second thing. And so what was the last thing?
speaker-0: Junior never bought the pickup truck. Instead, the company CPA prepped the title transfer as a flat out gift from the company to Junior.
speaker-1: So leaving behind the tax implications, what can because we're not here to talk about that, what
speaker-0: What conclusion did you draw from that? Well, you you went right to where my mind went, which was is this some sort of tax dodge? Maybe they were just trying to figure out a way to get money to the sun and cheaper way than than just handing them the money. But I didn't know what it meant. All I knew is that it was weird. And I have zero expertise in anything tax based. So all I was left with at that point was just a weird feeling that there was something going on back here. And I wanted to explore the idea of the tax dodge, but I didn't really know what good that would do.
speaker-1: So why did they say they gave Junior the
speaker-0: truck. They had the best of all reasons, which is they said he was awesome. He was an awesome employee and an awesome person. And that he ⁓ you know, very well deserved of the bonus.
speaker-1: I think I'm an awesome person and I think I'm an awesome employee. People don't give me trucks, but I guess that makes sense.
speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ it was it was a very plausible explanation. That's why you would give somebody big old bonuses. The problem was that we had talked to former employees of the construction company who had worked with junior. And we talked to former employees who worked with junior at other places. And they did not describe working with junior as being awesome. They didn't think he was an awesome employee. They didn't think he was an awesome person. They said the opposite. They said that if you were around him for any length of time at all, Soon enough, you'd want to punch him. And that's a pretty extreme way to describe how somebody makes you feel. And get a load of this. So every time we talked to a former employee, we'd ask them if they had ever been given a truck or if they've ever been given a big bonus for being awesome. And not a single one, not a single former employee ever said, Yeah, yeah, that happened to me, or I even heard of it happening to anybody else. Nobody ever said they'd ever heard.
speaker-1: Shocking. I I was gonna ask you for the construction company's name and phone number if that was what they were regularly giving as bonuses. How big was this company?
speaker-0: Well, construction companies go up and down based on how much work is out there in the world. But when this one was busy, it would be up to a hundred people. And construction companies with a hundred people go through a lot of trucks.
speaker-1: And just for perspective for me, is 100 people big for a construction company? Is that small? Is that average sized?
speaker-0: There's just a million different kinds of construction companies. There's gonna be some which are just a few people and some which are thousands. So this is pretty substantial. They would get big gigs. They would work for government projects all over Texas.
speaker-1: Okay. So where do you go to next?
speaker-0: So we decided to see if the construction company had ever ever given or sold another pickup truck to any other employee. ⁓ because we like said, the former employees that we talked to said they'd never heard of it. We want to know had it ever happened any other time other than what you.
speaker-1: How do you go about finding those details?
speaker-0: It was nothing but 100% elbow grease. We ordered the title history for every vehicle the company had ever owned, which was a mountainous pile of paper. And I read every single page looking for a clip.
speaker-1: And you do all that in discovery or were you in pre-discovery?
speaker-0: We didn't really want the other side to know what we were looking for. So we got all these records directly from the government without telling them what we were looking for.
speaker-1: ⁓ that's brilliant. So what did you find?
speaker-0: All right. So imagine the sequence that would show up on Junior's truck's history. First it would say that it was owned by the company, and then it was owned by Junior, and then it was owned by the insurance company that got the salvage because the thing was destroyed in the collision. So employer and then employee and then insurance company. That'd be the sequence. Now going through this haystack of government documents, one other vehicle had ever gone from employer to employee before. Just one. We're gonna call that that employee Daniel. Now that caught my eye for sure, but what really blew me away were two of the details. First, Daniel gets that truck at pretty much the same time Junior got his truck. And second, and this is crazy weird to me at the time, where Junior totaled his truck six months after getting it. The truck that went to Daniel was totaled in just four weeks. So employer, then employee, then four weeks later, it's owned by an insurance company. So the exact same flow chart as junior struck.
speaker-1: This leads to so many questions, but but could you find out why Daniel's truck was
speaker-0: totaled. Well, we had to find out. We had to know. So we went looking for the crash report for Daniel. And we see the one there where the truck is total. We can tell by the date that that's what it is. But, you know, like a neon light, we see one on there that was he was involved in a prior collision, a little bit from before when the truck was given him in the first place. So we asked the state of Texas to send us both those records. And we got them.
speaker-1: So we've got two collisions with two company trucks. What was the older one?
speaker-0: So the older one, the one from before, was a strange document that said that Daniel caused an accident in Austin when he had a seizure. Now we wanted to know the whole story behind that. So I hop the car and I drive down to Austin and I talked to every single person who saw what happened the day of the seizure. And it turned out to be a big incident. So picture the seizure coming over Daniel. He bounces all over an intersection in Austin, totally out of control. And a school crossing guard even has to rush to pull half a dozen kids out of the way. of this vehicle that's going everywhere because Daniel can't control himself. He's just totally overcome by the seizure.
speaker-1: This was a confirmed seizure? Okay. Was he on the job at that time?
speaker-0: Yes, it was. Time. He was on the job at that time. He had just picked up fuel for the company and he was delivering it to the work site.
speaker-1: Okay, so even though it's not a company car, it's his personal car that's been gifted to him, his employer, the c this construction company, is still gonna find out that this incident happened.
speaker-0: Well, yeah, they will find out. This was the vehicle he was in before he was given one. So this was a company vehicle back then. And the company was absolutely can find out about it because if you think about it, their insurance was gonna have to pay for all the damage that it caused at the intersection. Now, of course, how that works is the insurance company will write a check for the damage, but it's not done then. It it then, you know, turns to ⁓ the construction company and it sends them a bill and it says, all right. It's your turn now to write us a check 'cause you got to pay for your deductible.
speaker-1: Course. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have had to pay deductibles. I know that I've had to pay deductibles.
speaker-0: Okay, but this part's gonna blow your mind, Renee. The day the CPA wrote the check to his own insurance company for the deductible on Daniel's seizure caused accident was the exact same day that the CPA handed the pickup truck to Junior. Wait.
speaker-1: At at this point, so many questions, but all new ones.
speaker-0: Yeah, before I was wondering about, you know, possible tax dodge, even though I didn't know if that was going to help me. Now I was wondering if Junior, like Daniel, who had the seizure problem, had a health problem that made him a high risk driver. Daniel had the seizure disorder. Did Junior have a health problem, something along those same lines? So think about the inconsistent stories we've been told about Junior. The employer said he was this awesome fellow, but former coworkers all said, He'd make you want to punch it. Yeah. Try to figure out what was what. And we had about a hundred different things we had to do to get the real story. When we finally got the authoritative medical records, we saw that junior had been diagnosed with a whole raft of mental illnesses, all of which seemed to be more, they seemed to me like they would make it hard for him to exercise good judgment reliably, including one of his diagnoses was for something called rage disorder. I remember the moment before I had on collision on the highway, he was trying to go around another driver because he didn't like the way the other driver was driving.
speaker-1: he was at his car in the first place because he was having a fight with his wife. How can you tell how severe this problem is for Junior? I it's hard to get somebody's psychological records, even in discovery.
speaker-0: It's crazy hard. Rightfully, courts protect the privacy of our trying to get mental health care. But we had a thought of a way that we could illustrate how severe his judgment was. I got to ask Junior about it. So when we when we saw that Junior had connections in several other states, we went looking in those other states to see if he had any collisions in them. And he did. What was crazy was that he had a collision after this in Florida. Having a collision after this one is really hard to fathom because imagine he is actually waiting for his criminal trial. The judge has said, listen, son, you don't have to wait in jail, but you got to follow my rules. And because I very well may sentence you for decades, you know, functionally the rest of your life, I expect you to follow my rules because you don't want to make me angry when it comes time to sentencing. You're being accused of this vehicular homicide. So here's my rules. You do not get to drive until your trial. And you cannot leave the state of Texas. All right. So those are pretty clear rules. And nevertheless, we find this police report saying that he got in an accident in a whole other state. That's that's amazing. Even with the trial ahead of him, he could not resist the temptation to do what his urges were telling him to do, which was get in the car, defy the judge's orders. drive poorly in a whole other state. And to make it even more of an extreme scenario, when he gets in this Florida collision, his wife was with him. All he had to do was to avoid the worst part of this, him being behind the wheel, causing another collision, was just have her drive. If he had simply left Texas and not caused any harm, that's a very different story than causing another accident in violation of the judge's orders. So with that Harris in my head, I'm like, my gosh, how impossible was it for Junior To ever exercise reasonable judgment.
speaker-1: Was he drunk in the Florida accident? No. So Daniel's health problem was that he might have a seizure. Junior's health problem is leaving him completely unable to resist whatever impulses come to his mind.
speaker-0: Very different causes of the exact same consequence. Neither of these young men, Daniel or Junior, could simply decide to be a safe driver. Daniel couldn't stop a seizure from happening, and nothing Junior did could make him make sound judgment decisions. It wasn't in his program. They didn't have the ability to do that by as a matter of decision.
speaker-1: And I think there was a critical part of your story where there were the transfer of two pickups from this company. And I I want you to paint the scene that you were envisioning there, because I know that's a crucial detail and I want to hear about it.
speaker-0: Yeah, so what I was picturing, I actually got to talk to Senior, the owner, about in person. I laid out for him exactly what I was picturing. Once I had all these parts in my head, I confronted him when he was under oath. And the truth is, I got him trapped by all the facts. And once he was trapped into confessing all these details about Daniel and the seizure in Austin and everything else, he confessed that, yeah, he, the CPA, and Daniel. Did this whole move with Daniel's pickup truck just to hide the fact that Daniel, this incredibly dangerous employee, was driving all over Texas in a company truck. Now, he did not confess that Junior's truck was done for the same reason. He maintained straight out that Junior was always awesome and he did not have any problems with the way Junior drove. But he did reveal that the day they decided to give Daniel the truck. They had a conversation about that. And it was the exact same conversation where they decided to give Junior the truck. And though Senior denied that he considered Junior to be dangerous, the way that he saw Daniel debate, I never doubted it after I got the confession about Daniel. In fact, one of the people who actually did punch Junior in the face when Junior made him so angry was the dad, Junior's father. And he got prosecuted for that. So This whole story about he was awesome and everybody loved him was so demonstrably true that somebody's father punched him in the face.
speaker-1: His own father and the company owner was the one that punched him. Yeah. So what happened to everybody in this?
speaker-0: Well, once we got that confession, the case wrapped up then. And Daniel did get in that second collision. And like the first one, it was because of a seizure, but he didn't hurt anybody in that time. He just took out a fence. And you would think that the second collision through Daniel and Junior's tragedy would have stopped them from letting Daniel drive, but they actually let him drive for a whole nother year, a whole nother year longer after that. The construction company, once we got the confession, ⁓ I was able to force them to sell the entire company to a different construction company that was far more responsible. Junior was sentenced to jail before I got the confession. And if I recall correctly, he got a 20-year sentence. And when I spoke with him there, I told him, Junior, even though I represent the family, I don't think you belong here. Now I didn't want him out free either. I wanted him somewhere where he could get the help with his mental illnesses that he needed. Now, as for the owner and the CPA, they lost their business, but they were never prosecuted. And I think that is a travesty. The way I see it, they looked at their workforce and asked themselves, who is most likely to kill themselves and who is most likely to kill somebody else? And correctly, they picked Daniel and Junior. I mean, in four weeks, Daniel had the second collision. In six months, Junior caused this unbelievable nightmare. Their prediction was incredibly accurate. The owner and the CPA knew that they were probably arranging a future homicide. They didn't know if it was an employee, if it was Junior, their son, dad's son, or if it was some married couple on day night who would be killed. But they knew that somebody was probably going to be killed. And that when that happened, they didn't want anybody realizing that their employees were really driving company trucks. That they'd simply disguised as personal trucks with this little tricky paperwork move of theirs. So in my mind, what they did is worthy of a criminal prosecution. And that is, for me, the secret crime hiding behind the obvious one. Junior couldn't help what he did, but these people calculated exactly what they did.
speaker-1: Amazing. Did Daniel have any wherewithal to realize he should not be driving? Or did he ever mention that he said to the owners maybe I shouldn't drive?
speaker-0: Yeah, let's let's contrast Daniel and Junior here. And I'm gonna tell you another one of Junior's diagnoses. He had a diagnosis called narcissism disorder, which means that when somebody told him he was an awesome employee, he believed it. And they did tell him that when they gave him the truck. Junior, you're an awesome employee. Here's your truck. He had no sense of perspective on all the problems he caused and that he was not an awesome employee. So he absolutely believed it. He did not know that he was a pawn in this scheme. Daniel, on the other hand, did know. But when you are, you know, a young fellow in East Texas and you now can't drive legally because you have this seizure disorder, you have very little power to do anything. So when the boss says, Daniel, this is how we're going to do this so you can keep your job, we're going to hand you the truck and you're going to pretend it's yours, that's what you do, because you need a job.
speaker-1: ⁓ my, but he knew that he was not fit to be driving. Well no, he he did not actually because he had he was a narcissist.
speaker-0: He thought he could do everything great. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: What happened to this family?
speaker-0: the family is every bit as beautiful as the husband was. And they are still very, very important to me. I've attended two weddings for the kids. I helped one kid get into law school. And they came to surprise birthday party that my wife threw for me a couple of years ago. They're amazing.
speaker-1: So you stayed close. That's awesome. How how did this lawsuit help them?
speaker-0: Well, we got well over a hundred times what anybody thought we could get. And though that was nowhere near what they deserved, it was literally every penny available. And when we signed all the paperwork on that, though I was required to keep lots of details secret, I expressly included in that document that I'm allowed to teach any practicing lawyer every detail of the case with my files completely open. And I promised the family that I would never give up on teaching other lawyers about it. So that they could spot this homicidal scheme, which like as I said, I'm sure has killed countless innocents and I think is still killing innocents.
speaker-1: Do you think this practice, ⁓ this conspiracy is commonplace amongst companies?
speaker-0: I think it's worse than I painted because the only reason I caught them is because I got lucky and they created a paper trail for me and having the truck go directly from the company to junior. If they had just handed him a $5,000 bonus and then told him, you're taking this money and you're buying this piece of junk ⁓ truck that is waiting for you at the used car lot. with ball tires and you know ⁓ everything else that's wrong with it. How would I ever seen that? It would have been completely invisible to me and it would have been impossible to ever find that connection. And the incentive would have been to buy the most dangerous truck out there, one with no decent brakes, no tires, every every mechanical problem, because that's how you can do it cheapest. So they're incentivized to do this exact same scheme, but just with the one step in between of Doing it with cash and giving them express instructions on what they're going to do with it. And that's how they can separate on paper that people are driving for the companies when they're not, when it doesn't look like they are. And here's where this whole thing came from. So I mentioned that the CPA did the paperwork. Before he went to work for this construction company, he worked for a massive business. And I could see that one of the zillions of things this massive business did was risk management. Risk management means insurance. When you ever hear that, it's just a euphemism for insurance. Now, that he worked somewhere in this company that does risk management, doesn't know that doesn't mean he knew anything about risk management. So I again started calling employees of that company. And I said, hey, who knows this fellow? And what about his department that he was in? Like, ⁓ yeah, yeah. That was the risk management department. So He left this company that advises people on how to handle insurance and immediately put this trick to use when he got to a place where he was being paid to do so. So it's probably absolutely everywhere.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. Now did this case set precedents in Texas?
speaker-0: It did not go up on appeal. So it's not the kind of case you're gonna read about in those books that always appear ⁓ you know, on the TV shows. But I've been asked to lecture on this case and I've done it, gosh, in Miami and Chicago and Vegas and everywhere I can I go and and try to teach the details of this because it's it's hard to be a lawyer and to even look for the stuff. It's just not the way our practices are designed that we can spend enough time and money to dig through hundreds of thousands of pages trying to put together these little nuances. I mean, we've covered it in these few minutes, but it was I'm not nearly as smart as as it sounds because it took me four years to put this together. And it was, it was a bloody knuckles four years trying to get all the parts to come together in my head.
speaker-1: What key takeaways do you have for the general public? What are the important lessons learned? And what would you tell folks who might be in this situation or think they are?
speaker-0: Hard to say this without being little bit critical of ⁓ the nature of my practice. The every single lawyer you call, whether they're an injury lawyer or not, if you tell them that you lost a loved one to a drunk driver, they're gonna make you their client. Everybody thinks that drunk driving cases are easy money. And they are. Any one of those lawyers that talked to the family could have closed the case for $50,000 with a phone call. And Turning $50,000 into a phone call ⁓ is that's a great investment. Nobody gets paid that much for five minutes work. The problem is that if we don't look deeper and we don't try to find out what's really, really going on, then these things can multiply and they become good business decisions. This was a good business decision for the CPA and the construction company, except they got caught. The only reason they had to sell their company was because they got caught. And that takes a lot of work. So you need to find a lawyer who is willing to look deeper into why somebody was killed in a drunk driving accident. Was it it came from a bar? Was there really a hidden employment connection? Heck, were they driving for Uber? Were they driving for Grubhub? Was there something wrong with one of the vehicles that that led to these deaths? It's it's hard to do. I guess the the best rule of thumb is to not hire a lawyer who's got a billboard. You need to find somebody who only has a few cases who can be neurotic and dig into these things in this in the kind of detail that it requires.
speaker-1: Great advice and what an amazing case and just intriguing. Thank you so much, Mark, for joining us today to discuss this. We are going to put the details for your law firm in the show notes page. So I'd like to encourage all of our listeners to check out those show notes so that you can find Mark. Thank you again for joining us and unpacking this. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of Parallel Justice.
speaker-0: Thanks so much, Renee.
speaker-1: Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. Again, we know the topics discussed can be difficult and may be emotionally triggering. Support is available at victimconnect.org through call, text, or chat. We encourage you to take time today to learn about your rights and options that are available to you. Building safer communities requires every one of us to take action. Visit victimsofrime.org to learn more. And check out our show notes for today's speakers' information. This podcast was created by the National Center for Victims of Crime in partnership with our center and affiliate, the National Crime Victim Bar Association, the nation's first professional association of attorneys and expert witnesses dedicated to helping victims seek justice through the civil justice system. To support this podcast, please visit victimsofrime.org/slash donate. Parallel Justice is produced by the National Center for Victims of Crime and written and hosted by me, Renee Williams.
