Two Workers Killed at a Kraft Plant, and a $46.5 Million Verdict Against the Security Company

On the evening of September 9, 2010, a Kraft Foods bakery plant in Northeast Philadelphia was running its night shift when Yvonne Hiller, an employee who had been suspended hours earlier after a workplace argument, left the building and came back with a .357 Magnum. About 120 workers were still inside. Hiller made her way to a third-floor mixing room and opened fire.

Two of her coworkers were killed. Tanya Wilson, 47, and LaTonya Brown, 36, both died, and a third worker was wounded. Hiller was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The families of the two women who died turned to Kline & Specter.

The lawsuit did not target Kraft. It targeted U.S. Security Associates, the Georgia company hired to guard the plant. The guards on duty were unarmed, and the evidence at trial showed they did almost nothing as Hiller returned. Surveillance video captured a supervisor running and hiding in a boiler room. The guards left their post, warned a single mechanic outside, and never used the plant's public address system, never radioed Kraft management, and never alerted the roughly 120 employees still working inside during the minutes it took Hiller to reach them. Shanin Specter, Dominic Guerrini, and Patrick Fitzgerald argued that the company had one job, to protect the people in that building, and abandoned it.

The case was tried in Philadelphia in early 2015. In February, the jury found U.S. Security Associates negligent and awarded $8.02 million in compensatory damages. The following month, on March 30, 2015, the same jury added $38.5 million in punitive damages, for a total of roughly $46.5 million. "Their guards just ran away in the middle of a crisis," Specter said of the result.

The fight did not end with the verdict. U.S. Security Associates appealed, and in July 2017 a three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court set aside the $38.5 million punitive award. The panel reasoned that the families had been permitted to revive a punitive damages claim shortly before trial, after the statute of limitations on it had run. The $8.02 million compensatory verdict was left in place. That panel opinion did not stand as the last word. In September 2017 the Superior Court withdrew it and agreed to rehear the punitive damages question before its full bench, a step the firm had requested.