(c) Copyright 2002, The Miami Herald. All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
B
All-female jury hears suit over gun in teacher's shooting
BY SUSAN SPENCER-WENDEL
Palm Beach Post
Six women, three of them schoolteachers, will determine whether
the
Saturday Night Special used to murder Lake Worth Middle School teacher
Barry Grunow should have ever been sold.
The gun company being sued, Valor Corp. of Sunrise, objected
repeatedly this week to the all-female panel, but was out of chances
to
remove jurors.
Seated after weeks of jury selection, the jury includes a teacher
and
teacher aide working in public schools and a private school teacher.
A Valor attorney, Walter Latimer, complained unsuccessfully to
Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga that the company was being denied a
trial by
a jury of its peers. Labarga told him the company was not entitled
to a
panel of peers, but a panel of fair and impartial people, which
he
believed they were.
UNIQUE CASE
And so the local gunfight being watched around the nation began.
While the nation's highest courts have regularly bounced out lawsuits
against gun makers and manufacturers, the Grunow case is unique.
It's
believed to be one of the first to argue that the gun is inherently
defective because it has no legitimate purpose.
Grunow's widow, Pam, is suing Valor because it distributes the Raven
pistol, arguing the $33 handgun used by 13-year-old Nathaniel Brazill
is
unsafe, defective and should have never been on the market. Her
attorneys, Rebecca Larson and Bob Montgomery, have asked for $75
million
in the product liability case.
Montgomery said he sought jurors who had neither guns in their houses
nor any experience with them. That they ended up all females and
some
schoolteachers is "just how they fell," he said.
The two alternate jurors seated are also females.
The case is being watched across the nation because it tackles two
hot-button gun issues: flaws of the so-called "Saturday Night
Special"
handgun and the concept of trigger locks on weapons.
Fingering the tiny, silver .25-caliber Raven, Larson emphasized
in
her opening statement the gun's lack of a lock and its use almost
exclusively as a gun to commit crime.
"The defense's product has absolutely devastated the lives
of
everyone who came into contact with it," Larson said.
Valor, as professional distributors of the gun, "could have
made it
safe from the very get-go" by putting locks on that type of
gun, Larson
said. "Just like an automobile. We don't have to go down .
. . and have
seat belts installed in our cars."
DEFENSE EXHIBIT
Valor attorney John Renzulli countered with an exhibit of his own
--
a chart showing the ownership of the Raven gun used to kill Barry
Grunow.
The gun legally changed hands for 11 years -- and no licensing agent
or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ever ordered it off
the
streets, he said.
"If Raven was not a burned-down building, this gun could be
sold . .
. by the federal government's laws today," Renzulli said. "Evidence
will show that this gun became a crime gun when Nathan Brazill stole
it
and used it to shoot Barry Grunow."
Renzulli laid the blame for Grunow's death squarely on a Brazill
family friend, Elmore McCray. McCray left the gun in an Oreo cookie
tin
in an unlocked desk drawer when Brazill stole it five days before
shooting Grunow on May 26, 2000.
'How can we have prevented it? It's easy to say 'Don't sell it.'
A
car is driven recklessly, kills somebody, then don't sell the car,
that
will avoid it," Renzulli said, facing the jury. "That's
a question for
you." A fire destroyed the gun's manufacturer, Raven Firearms,
in 1991,
so that company is not named in the lawsuit.
The five-week trial promises a bellicose back-and-forth between
the
two sides. At one point Monday, they bickered about how to introduce
the
son of the Valor president, seated in the gallery, to the jury.
Judge
Labarga was clearly annoyed.
"I can't believe we're wasting court reporter paper on this,"
he
said, before shutting them down.