Will lawyer follow Sandy Hook playbook in Texas case?
Bridgeport attorney who won a $73M settlement for 9 local families is representing parents of slain Uvalde child
NEWTOWN — Will the attorney who won a $73 million settlement from Remington for nine Sandy Hook families use the same playbook in his legal dealings with the company that made the AR-15-style rifle used in the Texas massacre last month?
Yes and no.
“Of course you look at the precedent, but in any complicated case as grievous and shattering as this, you have to keep your toolkit wide open and look at everything,” said Josh Koskoff, a Bridgeport attorney who last week made national news by calling on riflemaker Daniel Defense to provide “information about its marketing, especially to teens and children” and about the gun company’s communications with the Uvalde shooter. “The Sandy Hook playbook is part of it, but you don’t want to start out with tunnel vision because you can miss what’s right in front of you.”
Uvalde is the small Texas town where an 18-year-old gunman drove to an elementary school and killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers on May 24. The brutality of the massacre was all the more traumatic here because it had so many parallels to the shooting of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
Koskoff and a team of Texas lawyers who are representing the parents of a slain Uvalde fourth-grade girl in many ways drew the battle lines last week for a legal fight with Georgiabased Daniel Defense. The parents’ lawyers called on the company to turn over information “relevant to your marketing of AR-15 style rifles to teens and children; to your incitement and encouragement of the assaultive use of these weapons; to your online purchase system; and to your communications, on any platform, with the Uvalde shooter; and to your awareness of the prior use of AR-15 style rifles in mass shootings.”
Those fighting words, released to the media, produced scores of headlines across the country that the lawyer who won the historic settlement in Connecticut with the onetime gunmaking giant Remington was following the same battle plan in Texas on behalf of grieving parents.
Koskoff cautioned on Tuesday that he was not rushing with a predetermined mindset into anything.
“No matter how a case appears from the outside, you don’t bring a lawsuit until you have as much information as you can get to build the case,” Koskoff said.
In Connecticut, where nine families sued Remington for unlawful marketing of the AR-15-style rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting, Koskoff attorneys were seeking Remington’s internal marketing documents right up to February, when the defunct manufacturer’s four insurance companies offered to the families all they had left after two Remington bankruptcies — $73 million.
In Texas, Koskoff ’s June 3 letter to Daniel Defense served as a legal warning for the company to preserve data and records of “all potentially relevant information” regarding advertising, market studies, and purchase records, as well a legal request for the company to turn over marketing materials to the lawyer team representing the parents of the slain girl.
“We ask you to begin providing information to us now, rather than force (the parents) to file a lawsuit to obtain it,” the letter read.
Daniel Defense did not respond Tuesday to a request from Hearst Connecticut Media for comment. The company posted a statement on its website saying its “thoughts and prayers go out to the families and community devastated by this evil act.”
“We will cooperate with all federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities in their investigations,” the statement read. “We will keep the families of the victims and the entire Uvalde community in our thoughts and our prayers.”
Koskoff said the first purpose of the lawyers’ June 3 letter was to test Daniel Defense on its word to cooperate with investigations by turning over internal documents.
Koskoff would not speculate what happens next, except to say that Daniel Defense had been put on notice.
“It would be nice if they cooperated … but the second purpose (of the letter) is to make sure nothing goes missing,” Koskoff said. “There are three options: they turn over the documents and cooperate, or they don’t turn over the documents but they maintain them, or they engage in criminal behavior and destroy the documents. We are not suggesting that they’ll choose door number three.”