Multnomah County Jury Returns $21.25 Million for the Family of a Man Killed by an Unlicensed Guard in a Lowe's Parking Lot

On May 29, 2021, Freddy Nelson Jr. drove to a shopping center next to a Lowe's in North Portland to collect wooden pallets, a pickup he said a store employee had arranged. Logan Gimbel, an armed guard working for Cornerstone Security Group, blocked Nelson's pickup truck and told him he was under arrest. Gimbel tried to open the locked door, then pepper-sprayed Nelson and his wife, Kari, through the window. Moments later he fired three shots through the windshield and killed Freddy Nelson. Kari Nelson watched her husband die from the passenger seat.

Nelson was 49. He left a wife, his parents, and three adult sons. Gimbel had no business carrying a gun on that job. He had trained as an armed guard, but Oregon's licensing agency never received his application to work armed, so the state had certified him only as an unarmed guard. Three weeks after the shooting, he surrendered his security license outright.

A Multnomah County jury convicted Gimbel of second-degree murder in May 2023, and the court sentenced him to life in prison with a chance at parole after 25 years. The criminal case answered for what Gimbel did. It did not reach the companies that put an untrained, unlicensed armed guard in a retail parking lot.

The Nelson family brought a wrongful death case and hired the D'Amore Law Group. Tom D'Amore tried it with Ben Turner, Amy Bruning, and Savannah Stevens. Their case ran past Gimbel to the people who hired and directed him. They showed the jury that Cornerstone Security Group failed to train an armed guard for the violence its own assignment invited, and that TMT Development, the company managing the property, pushed a "zero tolerance" approach toward anyone it treated as a nuisance in the lot. The defense argued that Nelson shared the blame for the confrontation.

The trial ran from early to late September 2024 in Multnomah County Circuit Court. On September 24, the jury returned $21.25 million. It awarded $10 million in noneconomic damages to Nelson's parents and three sons, another $10 million to Kari Nelson, and $1.25 million in punitive damages after finding the conduct of Cornerstone and Gimbel reckless. The jury placed 80 percent of the fault on TMT Development. It assigned 10 percent to Lowe's, which had settled before trial, and 10 percent to Nelson.