by Bryant Simon
Avoiding a criminal trial, Emmett Roe pled guilty to twenty-five counts of involuntary manslaughter. As part of the settlement, the state dropped all charges against Brad Roe and James Hair. Emmett Roe was sentenced to nineteen years and eleven months in a minimum-security facility, with parole possible in less than five years.
After he formally entered his plea in court, Roe was taken to jail. He didn’t make a statement to the press, though Cheshire described his client to the media as a “nonviolent” person who struck a deal to “save his family.”62
Assistant District Attorney David Graham also spoke to the press. He painted a different picture of Roe. “Our investigation did show that Emmett Roe ran the plant as a dictator,” he explained. “He personally made the decision to padlock the door.” Insisting that justice had been served, he concluded, “I’m confident the person who is responsible . . . is in prison.”63
Reporters tracked down Imperial survivors and the families of the victims to get their reactions. “Someone asked me what I thought was fair punishment for them,” Catherine Dawkins, the widow of the Lance delivery man, remarked, “and I said, ‘I don’t think the electric chair would be as bad as what Phil went through the last few minutes of his life.’”64 Line worker Dolores Gail Pouncey couldn’t believe that Brad Roe had gotten off without punishment. He was “the worst,” she said. “It was a set up,” declared Mary Alice Quick’s sister, Martina. Emmett Roe, she insisted, should “have to [do] the whole 250 years.” “I don’t think it’s fair,” proclaimed Lula Smith, whose daughter, Cynthia Ratliff, died at Imperial, “He’s responsible for the fire. That’s like murder.”65
Fire survivor Conester Williams felt a mix of anger and disappointment. “Those were twenty-five of my best friends who died in that fire. I feel like he deserved more time.” Still, she held out hope for justice: “I feel in my heart God is going to punish him in prison.”66
Frustrations with the criminal justice system didn’t stop Imperial workers from looking for revenge, for justice, and for money in civil court. An army of lawyers arrived in Hamlet on September 3, 1991, just behind the fire trucks and the news vans. Some came from up the road or had offices near the courthouse in Rockingham. Others flew in from Washington, D.C., or drove down from Durham. Hospital workers found lawyers wandering the corridors of ICU units looking for victims and family members. A few days later, “ambulance chasers” stalked the Victims Assistance Center. There were so many of them there that the city called in extra police officers to keep them away. Funeral directors heard late-night knocks on their doors. So did preachers. Several Imperial workers belonged to Reverend Miller’s First Baptist Church. While he prepared to bury his parishioners and minister to the needs of the living, his phone rang. A lawyer on the other end of the line introduced himself and promised him a handsome finder’s fee or a hefty church donation if he steered clients in his direction.67
Some of the meetings between lawyers and Imperial families produced mismatches. Well-educated and confident attorneys sweet-talked anguished and undereducated poor families. They promised justice in the form of financial windfalls. Just sign on the dotted line. Some told the bereaved that the cases would be hard, that testifying in court could dredge up painful memories and stir up raw emotions. They urged caution, explaining to them how hard it was to predict how juries and judges would react to evidence. It was harder still, some explained, to guess the size of settlements. Some victims and family members took note of the guarded tone and remained cautious. Others heard what they wanted to hear. They dreamed of roomy new homes out in the country and gleaming Cadillacs parked in the driveway. One local car dealer, in fact, offered loans to Imperial workers, saying they could drive their new vehicles off the lots right away and pay off the notes—with, of course, high interest—when they got their money. For others, it was simple. “We got bills to pay,” was how Ada Blanchard, who couldn’t go back to work yet and was trying to get by on worker’s compensation and unemployment benefits, explained her reasoning for hiring a lawyer.68
By the first Christmas after the fire, just about everyone who had worked on the first shift at Imperial and their families had lawyered up, some with local attorneys and others with out-of-town solicitors.
In fact, nine days after the fire, the estate of Mary Lillian Wall, who got trapped behind the padlocked door near the dumpster and couldn’t get out before the poisonous gases lurking in the plant killed her, filed the first lawsuit. Her lawyer alleged that Emmett and Brad Roe had removed evidence from the plant and, even more seriously, that they had showed “willful and wanton misconduct” with the locked and bolted doors. Despite the serious accusations, her attorney asked for the very modest sum of $10,000 in damages.69
Three weeks later, on October 2, 1991, Woody Gunter, a steady and thoughtful Rockingham lawyer representing Mildred Lassiter Moates and Gladys Faye Nolan, filed a civil suit charging the Roes with negligence and deliberately eliminating “effective interior barriers” that could have prevented the “spread of fire.” Trying to find an escape, the filing claimed, Moates fell down and was trampled by her frightened co-workers, themselves running in the dark. She lost much of her eyesight and suffered permanent brain damage as a result of her injuries. A doctor pronounced her “neurologically unresponsive.” Gladys Faye Nolan commuted to Imperial from Wallace, South Carolina, a town a third of the size of Hamlet. She fell unconscious during the blaze and suffered afterward from respiratory problems and severe burns on her arms. Worse were the flashbacks and nightmares that had her reliving the blaze from morning to night each day. Gunter raised the stakes on the lawsuits and asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for his clients.70
On October 18, 1991, John P. Coale, a high-profile Washington lawyer and the husband of Greta Van Susteren, later a Fox News personality, filed a sixth lawsuit, accusing Imperial Food Products of cutting back on maintenance at the plant to maximize profits. The plaintiffs included thirteen people injured in the fire and the relatives of ten people who died. Two weeks before he showed up at the U.S. District Court in Greensboro, Coale had been charged with illegally soliciting clients in Hamlet, though a warrant against him was never served. As he walked out of the courthouse the day of the filing, he told reporters that his clients stood to collect “hundreds of millions of dollars” from the company and its insurers. “This can hardly be called an accident,” he said in a statement, “Roe and his subordinates guaranteed that a disaster of this magnitude would occur.”71
Over the next several months, other fire victims and their families filed dozens of additional wrongful-death suits and more than fifty personal injury cases. The suits accused Emmett and Brad Roe and plant management of repeated acts of “gross, willful, and wanton” negligence, failure to provide proper fire suppression, and purposefully blocking exits and locking doors. By the start of 1992, Imperial Food Products and the Roes faced more than one hundred different lawsuits from dozens of lawyers and law firms all around the Southeast and mid-Atlantic.72
Most Imperial families dreamed rather modest dreams of paying off debts to funeral homes and furniture stores and escaping unscrupulous landlords and drafty tar-paper-covered shotgun houses. Some, stoked by the boasts of Coale and a few other lawyers, dreamed bigger dreams filled with tall houses, long boats, and flashy cars.73 Most of them still wanted the Roes to suffer in some way, but this would get complicated.
Following a two-month investigation, the North Carolina Department of Labor cited Imperial Food Products for eighty-three violations of OSHA standards, many of them “willful.” The agency fined the company a record-setting $808,150.74 Emmett Roe called the ruling “simply absurd” and suggested that the fine was a politically motivated attempt by the state’s workplace safety agency to stay out of federal hands.75 Softening his pitch, if not his parenting style, the head of Imperial Food Products explained in a letter contesting the penalties, “My knowledge of the operation led me to believe it was a safe place to work.
The fact that I ordered my son, Brad, to work in the plant . . . should, to reasonable people, dispel any notion that Imperial willfully violated anything which had any likelihood of causing death or serious bodily injury.”76 Still, Roe told state officials a month after the Labor Department’s ruling that he was “financially unable to pay even one dollar of any fine you have assessed.”77
The Department of Labor wasn’t the only group knocking on the doors of Imperial Food Products’ suburban Atlanta headquarters. Northwestern Bank of Pennsylvania in Wilkes-Barre wanted its loans paid back. Crown Credit, Credit Alliance, Dana Commercial Credit, Fleet Credit Incorporation, Hyster Credit, Orix Credit Alliance, and Rivera Finance were all looking for payments. In the fall of 1991, Imperial owed Cagle’s tens of thousands of dollars for frozen chicken parts. The company hadn’t paid all of its taxes or its water, utility, and phone bills in Cumming or Hamlet in full. And it had outstanding bills from Kikkoman International of San Francisco, Dixie Janitorial Services of Hamlet, the Sparks Belting Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, L & L Welding of Rockingham, and Multi Spice from Tupelo, Mississippi.78
By August 1992, Emmett Roe ended up in bankruptcy court, though he showed up in the Greensboro chambers without a lawyer, acting confused and befuddled. “I don’t know where I am,” he whispered to Judge James Wolfe. “I have no assets.” Claiming that banks removed $600,000 from his accounts the day after the fire to pay back the money he owed them, Roe declared, “I’m broke.”79 In a court filing, he said he had no cash, no savings, no furs or jewelry, and no auto, video, or computer equipment of any value. Over the next year or so, creditors, court officers, and forensic accountants found out that Emmett Roe wasn’t lying, though some of the victims still believed he was hiding money and other assets.80
With Imperial Food Products out of money, lawyers turned their attention to the firm’s three insurers: the American International Group, U.S. Fire Insurance Company, and the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. For months after the fire, these companies balked at paying fire victims, though Liberty did honor worker’s compensation claims. They argued that the conditions at Imperial were so bad, and so systematically unsafe, that they shouldn’t have to pay the claims. Yet, by December 1992, the insurance companies had abandoned this argument and agreed to pay $16.1 million, the maximum coverage held by Imperial, to the 101 individuals and families who had filed claims in the names of dead, injured, and emotionally scarred victims. Based on a formula that factored in future income and the severity of injuries, a formula hammered out by the judge and insurance company representatives—the lawyers for the families had little say in the matter—payouts in the wrongful-death cases ranged from $175,000 to $1 million. Settlements in the seventy-seven injury cases began at $2,500 and went up to $1,138,000.70 for Mildred Moates, who remained a year after the fire permanently injured and in need of nonstop care.81
In 1993, lawyers for Imperial victims and their families filed another lawsuit, charging “reckless misconduct” against forty-one different companies for contributing to the disaster. They accused parts makers of selling shoddy products and oil companies of hawking dangerously flammable fluids. The suit named Stein, the manufacturer of the industrial fryer at the center of the processing room, as a defendant. It charged Kemlite, the maker of the drop tiles that hung over the fryer, with marketing a product that ignited too easily and released, when it sparked, hazardous levels of carbon monoxide that blinded, disabled, and disoriented people.82 The multifaceted case turned out to be incredibly complicated and involved dozens of lawyers across multiple state lines. Expenses piled up as attorneys turned to teams of costly experts, scientists, and professional videographers. Eventually, after years of motions and counter-motions, the judge awarded the plaintiffs $24 million in damages. After covering all of the overhead costs and paying all of the lawyers’ fees, Imperial workers settled their cases for between $35,000 and $70,000 each. They used the money to pay more bills and settle some debts, buy new trailers and cars, and purchase clothes for their kids and grandkids.83
Other lawsuits took aim at local and state governments. Several plaintiffs blamed the city of Hamlet, in particular the fire department, for negligence. They argued that the department’s failure to inspect the plant and its alleged delay in entering the building on the morning of September 3 contributed to the death toll. After talking with Fire Chief David Fuller several times, the insurance company’s claims supervisor Gary Johnson recommended a negotiated settlement. He didn’t think the chief would make a credible and compelling witness on the stand if asked about the locked doors or allegations that he had a key to at least of one of them or rumors that the Roes paid off his department with chicken tenders. When Johnson pressed Fuller about these charges, the chief denied them, but he didn’t get incensed. He didn’t say, as Johnson expected him to, “That’s a damn lie and I challenge any son of bitch who thinks it to say it to my face.” With the backing of the town’s elected council, its insurer, Harleysville Insurance Company, paid out between $250,000 and $500,000 to fire victims, and the case went away.84 Another suit was filed against the state’s Department of Labor for failure to inspect enough workplaces, but it didn’t yield a settlement of any kind. Under North Carolina’s Tort Claims Act, a person injured by the state’s negligence could, in principle, collect up to $100,000. By a 5–2 decision, however, the North Carolina Supreme Court held that the labor department’s failure to inspect the Hamlet factory, “while neglectful, is not the kind of negligence for which damages can be collected.” From there, an appeal, Stone III v. the North Carolina Department of Labor, went to the United States Supreme Court, but the justices voted against hearing the case without comment.85
For some, the lawsuits created more disappointment, distrust, and trauma rather than a clear sense of justice. Unanswered questions surrounding the legal maneuvering of lawyers and how the settlements in their cases were determined acted for some as yet another set of triggers, especially when added to lingering questions about why Dobbins Heights firefighters were left on standby and why Hamlet officials said nothing about the locked doors. Unable to trust local leaders, the state Department of Labor, the fire department, the legal system, and their lawyers generated all-too-familiar—especially for people battling PTSD—feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and dread. Some didn’t even trust family members after sons and husbands stole from them and distant kin showed up asking for money. The uncertainties and tensions around the settlements negated the larger imagined moral mission of the lawsuits: justice.
The money burned a hole in some pockets. Lisa Amaya-Jackson remembered one woman who bought a new car for herself, one for her mom, and another for her dad. Pretty soon, she ran out of money, but not before her back pain, problems breathing, and frequent nightmares ended. Maybe she was thinking of Evelyn Wall, who received a six-figure settlement check.86 “I never put any of it in the bank,” she told Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood. Ten years after the fire, she was broke, her body so busted she couldn’t sweep her kitchen floor without losing her breath and her mind so rattled with trauma that she couldn’t tolerate crowds, even family gatherings. And she couldn’t get through the day without a combination of antidepressants and high-blood-pressure pills. She felt like people in Hamlet looked right through her; maybe she reminded them of what they wanted to forget. It’s like we “aren’t human,” she said.87
Drugs took over the lives of a few survivors. Sober and not so sober family members asked victims for gifts and interest-free loans, saying that they deserved this or that for taking care of the kids in the past and providing years of meals and housing. Georgia Quick couldn’t remember the last time she saw her mother before she showed up at Duke University Hospital, where a number of injured workers ended up after the fire. Pretty soon, Quick knew why she was there. She wanted money. So did a few other family members, leaving her to wonder whom she could trust.88
Most felt like they didn’t get what they were owed. “They did
n’t do us right,” Ada Blanchard said about her lawyers and the judges after getting her settlement. “No,” another survivor declared in 2015, “I don’t think I got a fair settlement. No one did.” Many were convinced, as one put it, that the lawyers “stole from us.” The ones who seemed to cope the best with the tragedy were the ones who got treatment for their PTSD symptoms and were represented by lawyers they trusted, like Woody Gunter. Still, many wondered why they got what they got and why someone else, with less severe injuries or emotional pain, in their estimation, ended up with more. What was fair about that, they wondered? How did the lawyers end up with so much of the money? They weren’t the one who suffered, were they? Some, as Stephen Frye, the psychologist who treated a number of the survivors, observed, were even competitive about the lawsuits. With new money creating new tensions, friends and family members, in some cases, turned against each other in the most vicious of ways.89
Frye told a story of an Imperial worker who picked sweet potatoes as a child, gave birth while still in her teens, and spent years battling with an abusive husband before she finally got him out of the house. For weeks after the fire, she sat almost motionless, not saying a word. Slowly, she got back on her feet and hired a lawyer, who then filed suit against the Roes and other plant managers. With her first settlement check, she put a down payment on a trailer and took in one of her sons, an out-of-work and troubled Gulf War veteran. Over the next few years, he allegedly drained his mother’s accounts, and the bank foreclosed on her home. With her second settlement, she bought another home. Not long after, she went to church one day like she usually did and died there. Apparently, she had never drawn up a proper will, so her husband, who she had not officially divorced and who supposedly hit her while they were still together, got everything she had.90