A jury on Monday evening found that Clark County and its security service, First Response, were not negligent in the 2014 shooting of Allen Bricker by a former colleague on the Vancouver Veterans Affairs campus.
Bricker was serving as the chief financial officer for the Veterans Affairs Northwest Health Network when he was shot Feb. 4, 2014, by Deborah Lennon, a former financial auditor who had worked alongside him. She walked into his fourth-floor office and shot him twice in the back. Bricker survived his injuries but still has two bullets lodged in his body.
Lennon was sentenced in 2015 in Clark County Superior Court to 22 1/2 years in prison.
The clinic where the shooting occurred rents space in the Center for Community Health at 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd., which is owned by the county.
At the time of the shooting, the county contracted with First Response for security services, but that contract has since expired. Rather than contract with two security companies, G4S Secure Solutions, which provides security for the courthouse, now provides service at the Center for Community Health, said Bob Stevens, the county’s director of general services.
Bricker and his wife, Laura, sued the county and First Response in 2016, alleging they failed to take reasonable steps to address safety issues in the common areas of the community health building. The couple sought $5.5 million in damages.
The trial ran two weeks in Superior Court before going to the jury Monday afternoon. Jurors deliberated for about two hours before finding the county and First Response were not negligent.
Lennon spent two years stalking Bricker, her former supervisor, after she left her job in 2012. She wrote hundreds of harassing emails to Bricker, and her conduct eventually escalated. Lennon showed up at Bricker’s office twice in the weeks leading up the shooting and was escorted off the property, according to the complaint filed in the case.
During closing arguments, Bricker’s attorney, Eric Neiman of Portland, said there were “genuine human errors and massive system failures” that contributed to Bricker being shot. He argued that the county and First Response didn’t take the threat against Bricker seriously and if they had, they could have prevented the shooting.
The county was responsible for keeping the parking lot, doorway, elevators, lobby and fourth-floor common area up to the door to the VA space safe, Neiman said.
A workplace violence prevention program was in place but wasn’t being implemented correctly, Neiman argued, and there was a breakdown in communication between the county and First Response.
The county and First Response could have done more, Neiman said, including employing additional security officers at the building or going to Risk Management or the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
Seattle attorney David Russell, who represented the county, argued that “there’s nothing (the county) did or didn’t do that caused Bricker to get shot. The shooting wasn’t foreseeable by anyone.”
Russell argued that Bricker never expressed concerns about Lennon physically hurting him. When she came to his office on the day of the shooting, Bricker didn’t call 911, hit the panic alarm or try to exit the conference room he was in through a different door. Instead, he went out to the reception area where he knew she was waiting for him.
Bricker also didn’t renew a protection order against Lennon that he had previously sought, Russell said.
Attorney Eron Cannon, who represented First Response, said his client also couldn’t foresee the shooting.
He argued that Bricker could have taken steps to protect himself if he was concerned about his safety — serving the protection order against Lennon, locking the front door of his office, providing a photo of Lennon to multiple law enforcement agencies — but he didn’t, which indicates he didn’t foresee the threat either, he said.
