$1.5 Million Settlement After Liquor Store Sold Vodka to 17-Year-Old Who Died on Prom Day

On April 20, 2012, a 17-year-old Fairland High School student walked into a Woodshed Liquor Store on Monkey Island in Oklahoma and bought a bottle of vodka. No one asked for identification. The next morning, as classmates gathered to decorate for prom, school administrators found him intoxicated and banned him from the event. He got behind the wheel anyway. He crashed his pickup truck on the way back, and an autopsy later recorded a blood alcohol level of 0.13. He was 17 years old.

The store clerk who made the sale, Stacey Dixon, was charged under Oklahoma law with furnishing alcohol to a person under 21, a felony. Investigators with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission reviewed the store's security footage and confirmed the clerk never asked for identification, even though state law required carding anyone who appeared younger than 30. That finding established the core fact the civil case would rely on: the sale should never have happened.

The boy's parents, Donna and Duane Kerns, retained Laurie Koller of Carr & Carr Injury Attorneys in Tulsa to pursue a wrongful death claim against The Woodshed. The company operated multiple convenience stores and liquor stores in the Grand Lake area. A separate civil suit against Fairland's school district, which faced negligence allegations over how administrators handled the situation, settled confidentially in October 2014.

The Woodshed case went to trial in March 2015 and settled on the second day. The Kerns family received $1.5 million. The settlement was, according to ABLE Commission Agent Erik Smoot, the largest he was aware of in Oklahoma in a case of this type. Smoot noted that settlement terms in such cases are rarely made public; the Kerns insisted otherwise and held to that condition before agreeing to resolve the case.

As part of the settlement terms, every employee at any Woodshed location who sells beer or alcohol was required to complete training through the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement (ABLE) Commission. The store's prior policy had been to card only customers who appeared younger than 30; that policy was changed to require ID from all customers. The Kerns family said they planned to use the proceeds to establish a hunting reserve with counseling and activities for youth, and to expand a welding scholarship already created in their son's name.