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Legal stakes raised over Cowboys' collapsed practice facility
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, March 6, 2010
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
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Two summers before the Dallas Cowboys' practice facility collapsed, team officials were scrambling to deal with warnings that the massive tentlike structure was unsafe.
Speed was of the essence, given concerns expressed by a building-collapse expert the team had hired and the fact that training camp was starting soon.
The company that built the facility vowed to fix it – although a design consultant confided that the "urgent time frame makes [him] 'want to vomit,' " according to a company lawyer's memo filed in federal court Friday.
The filing came on a day of dueling lawsuits that revealed new details about what preceded the Valley Ranch disaster last May and showed how tense relations have grown between the Cowboys and the two staffers who suffered the most serious injuries.
For the first time, scouting aide Rich Behm and special teams coach Joe DeCamillis took legal aim at team owner Jerry Jones. They did not target him personally or the Cowboys, but they did add three Jones businesses as defendants in lawsuits filed in August against the builder and related parties.
The Jones businesses – general contractor Blue Star Land LP, facility owner Blue Star Development Co. and land owner Cowboys Center Ltd. – failed to have their collapse expert review final repair plans, the amended lawsuit alleges. If they had, the suit states, "defects would have been discovered long before the tragic events that occurred on May 2, 2009."
Meanwhile, Cowboys lawyer Levi McCathern II sued builder Summit Structures, which is based in Pennsylvania, and its Canadian parent, Cover-All Building Systems. They alone must take the blame for the collapse, he said.
McCathern also fired a shot at Behm and DeCamillis' high-profile Dallas trial lawyer.
"Frank Branson has threatened us with a lawsuit for months if we didn't meet his outlandish demands – demands based on financial ability rather than legal liability," the Cowboys lawyer told The Dallas Morning News. "This filing finally gives us an opportunity to confront those threats in a court of law."
Branson said he proposed a settlement figure months ago only because McCathern pressed him to do so.
"We made what we believe was a reasonable offer," he said. "They were willing to talk the talk, but they were not willing to walk the walk."
When Branson first filed his suits, in Dallas County courts, he noted that Texas workers' compensation law prevented him from suing the Cowboys. He also said he had seen no sign that team officials shared blame for the collapse, which paralyzed Behm below the waist and left DeCamillis with a broken neck, persistent pain, numbness and mobility problems.
Dallas lawyer Tom Fee, who represents the builder, said he has designated the Jones businesses as "responsible third parties" in legal filings but has not sued them. He declined to comment further.
McCathern said Friday that he wasn't suing the Summit design consultant who spoke of being nauseated, Jeffrey Lawrence Galland, because the firm he worked for is in bankruptcy proceedings.
No one has explained how Galland came to be the consultant, given a personal history that The News brought to light a few weeks after the collapse: He was serving as engineering director of Las Vegas-based JCI, even though he had no engineering license, had falsified educational credentials and had served federal prison time for his role in a violent drug trafficking ring.
Galland's concern about the speed of fixes was described in a memo that another lawyer for the builder wrote in June 2007, after a conference call with McCathern and a second Cowboys lawyer. McCathern attached the memo to his lawsuit to illustrate a contention that "Summit mocked the consulting engineer retained by the Cowboys to initially determine whether the facility had structural deficiencies requiring a repair."
That engineer, Charles Timbie, had already served as the key expert witness in a Pennsylvania lawsuit that found Summit responsible for the 2003 collapse of another big tentlike structure. The News reported last year that the Cowboys knew about the incident, which hurt no one, before hiring the company later in 2003.
The memo says Galland "feels that if he had a full month to make his calcs [calculations] and do proper research, he could embarrass Charlie pretty good, but that in the meantime, considering the deadlines, Jeff is prepared to jump through Charlie's hoops, and will be happy to expose Charlie's misconceptions and mistakes down the road during the 'permanent fix' phase."
Those repairs followed what the memo described as "good weather" repairs "to get them through training camp."
Summit's engineering errors also caused the Irving collapse, a National Institute of Standards and Technology report concluded last fall. The federal agency warned that thousands of similar structures remain in use around the world and need to be checked for problems.
The report had "a number of incorrect assumptions," Fee said at the time, but he gave no specifics.
http://www.***BANNED-URL***/sharedc...llapse_06pro.ART.State.Edition2.4ba8b36.html?
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, March 6, 2010
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
begerton@***BANNED-URL***
Two summers before the Dallas Cowboys' practice facility collapsed, team officials were scrambling to deal with warnings that the massive tentlike structure was unsafe.
Speed was of the essence, given concerns expressed by a building-collapse expert the team had hired and the fact that training camp was starting soon.
The company that built the facility vowed to fix it – although a design consultant confided that the "urgent time frame makes [him] 'want to vomit,' " according to a company lawyer's memo filed in federal court Friday.
The filing came on a day of dueling lawsuits that revealed new details about what preceded the Valley Ranch disaster last May and showed how tense relations have grown between the Cowboys and the two staffers who suffered the most serious injuries.
For the first time, scouting aide Rich Behm and special teams coach Joe DeCamillis took legal aim at team owner Jerry Jones. They did not target him personally or the Cowboys, but they did add three Jones businesses as defendants in lawsuits filed in August against the builder and related parties.
The Jones businesses – general contractor Blue Star Land LP, facility owner Blue Star Development Co. and land owner Cowboys Center Ltd. – failed to have their collapse expert review final repair plans, the amended lawsuit alleges. If they had, the suit states, "defects would have been discovered long before the tragic events that occurred on May 2, 2009."
Meanwhile, Cowboys lawyer Levi McCathern II sued builder Summit Structures, which is based in Pennsylvania, and its Canadian parent, Cover-All Building Systems. They alone must take the blame for the collapse, he said.
McCathern also fired a shot at Behm and DeCamillis' high-profile Dallas trial lawyer.
"Frank Branson has threatened us with a lawsuit for months if we didn't meet his outlandish demands – demands based on financial ability rather than legal liability," the Cowboys lawyer told The Dallas Morning News. "This filing finally gives us an opportunity to confront those threats in a court of law."
Branson said he proposed a settlement figure months ago only because McCathern pressed him to do so.
"We made what we believe was a reasonable offer," he said. "They were willing to talk the talk, but they were not willing to walk the walk."
When Branson first filed his suits, in Dallas County courts, he noted that Texas workers' compensation law prevented him from suing the Cowboys. He also said he had seen no sign that team officials shared blame for the collapse, which paralyzed Behm below the waist and left DeCamillis with a broken neck, persistent pain, numbness and mobility problems.
Dallas lawyer Tom Fee, who represents the builder, said he has designated the Jones businesses as "responsible third parties" in legal filings but has not sued them. He declined to comment further.
McCathern said Friday that he wasn't suing the Summit design consultant who spoke of being nauseated, Jeffrey Lawrence Galland, because the firm he worked for is in bankruptcy proceedings.
No one has explained how Galland came to be the consultant, given a personal history that The News brought to light a few weeks after the collapse: He was serving as engineering director of Las Vegas-based JCI, even though he had no engineering license, had falsified educational credentials and had served federal prison time for his role in a violent drug trafficking ring.
Galland's concern about the speed of fixes was described in a memo that another lawyer for the builder wrote in June 2007, after a conference call with McCathern and a second Cowboys lawyer. McCathern attached the memo to his lawsuit to illustrate a contention that "Summit mocked the consulting engineer retained by the Cowboys to initially determine whether the facility had structural deficiencies requiring a repair."
That engineer, Charles Timbie, had already served as the key expert witness in a Pennsylvania lawsuit that found Summit responsible for the 2003 collapse of another big tentlike structure. The News reported last year that the Cowboys knew about the incident, which hurt no one, before hiring the company later in 2003.
The memo says Galland "feels that if he had a full month to make his calcs [calculations] and do proper research, he could embarrass Charlie pretty good, but that in the meantime, considering the deadlines, Jeff is prepared to jump through Charlie's hoops, and will be happy to expose Charlie's misconceptions and mistakes down the road during the 'permanent fix' phase."
Those repairs followed what the memo described as "good weather" repairs "to get them through training camp."
Summit's engineering errors also caused the Irving collapse, a National Institute of Standards and Technology report concluded last fall. The federal agency warned that thousands of similar structures remain in use around the world and need to be checked for problems.
The report had "a number of incorrect assumptions," Fee said at the time, but he gave no specifics.
http://www.***BANNED-URL***/sharedc...llapse_06pro.ART.State.Edition2.4ba8b36.html?
