The Morning Call of Allentown ran a front-page story this morning about a major lawsuit filed by Ross Feller Casey against Walmart for illegally selling an underage and drunk man ammunition that was used in a July killing spree that claimed three lives.
"The bottom line here is that Walmart sold .38-caliber handgun ammunition to an underage person in the middle of the night, and that ammunition was used to kill several people," attorney Matt Casey, who is representing the families of the three victims, told The Morning Call. "Ultimately a jury will decide whether that sale was consummated in a way that breached Walmart's duty to the victims.”
The lawsuit alleges that in the early morning hours of July 5, Robert Jourdain, 20, was allowed to purchase a box of ammunition from a Walmart despite being under 21 – the legal age to buy the bullets – and also appearing intoxicated. Jourdain gave the ammunition to his cousin, Todd West, who, within an hour of the purchase, used the rounds to kill three people on the streets of Allentown and Easton, Pennsylvania.
Casey, a founding partner of Ross Feller Casey, told the newspaper that gun sellers have substantial protection under federal law, but the facts of the case against Walmart are unique in the way that they fit into the exceptions in the law.
"The exception here,” Casey said, “is that it was an improper sale to a person not of the appropriate age whose presentation at the store, in that it was in the middle of the night and having come from a night of partying, should have alerted Walmart to the fact that it was not a proper sale.”
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