Relatives of three Jacksonville residents who were killed at a local Dollar General in August are suing the corporate retailer, alleging the company’s negligence made the store “a criminal’s safe haven” when a white 21-year-old with a swastika-painted rifle opened fire on its Black customers.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Duval County, comes from the family members of 52-year-old Angela Carr, 29-year-old Jerrald Gallion and 19-year-old A.J. Laguerre Jr., who were killed in the shooting that shook Jacksonville’s historic Black neighborhood of New Town.
The killing of Laguerre, a Dollar General employee who was working at the time, prompted an ongoing OSHA investigation of the store. That investigation is more expansive than standard federal probes following a workplace death, The Tributary first reported. The murders also add to a notorious record of cases Dollar General has racked up with the U.S. government’s workplace safety watchdog in recent years.
This isn’t the first lawsuit Dollar General has faced due to a customer being shot at this specific store either.
In November 2018, Kiristen Booker was getting back into her car after an evening stop at the Dollar General on Kings Road when a gunman slipped through a hole in a fence on the side of the property. He robbed and shot Booker in the parking lot. The wounds weren’t fatal, and Booker went on to file a similar negligence lawsuit against Dollar General. Among other things, she alleged the store lacked enough lighting for her or the store’s security cameras to get a clear visual of the shooter. The company settled with her before the case went to trial.
The current lawsuit names Dollar General’s security contractor, Interface Security Systems LLC, along with the shooter’s family and estate. The victims’ families also named the store’s landlord, Corso General II LLC, an entity formed in May that bought the 2161 Kings Road property less than three months before the shooting.
The victims’ family members filing the suit are Carrol Gibbs, Gallion’s mother; Quantavious Laguerre, one of Laguerre’s brothers; and Armisha Payne, one of Carr’s children, per the complaint.
They’re represented by high-profile attorneys Ben Crump and Michael Haggard, who held a press conference on Tuesday morning taking aim at Dollar General.
“They have put profits over people for years,” Haggard said.
Dollar General didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges the corporate defendants and the shooters’ parents were negligent, and it says the killer violated Florida’s Wrongful Death Act when he shot the victims. The complaint says the killings were “motivated by hate” and meant “to terrorize members of the African-American community.”
One pillar of the lawsuit’s argument against Dollar General, its security contractor and its landlord is surveillance footage released by authorities soon after the shooting. The brief clips show a maze of obstacles such as metal carts, towering containers, and product piles cluttered throughout the store, potentially hindering escape routes during the shooting.
That footage may also factor into the fatality-and-catastrophe investigation OSHA opened on Aug. 26, the day of the shooting. The federal regulator has since expanded the case from its standard “partial” scope to a broader “complete” scope, opening more room for scrutiny and potential penalties against the Dollar General on Kings Road.
OSHA spokesperson Eric Lucero declined to comment on the probe due to its ongoing status. He told The Tributary in an email that OSHA has six months after opening an investigation to cite an employer for violations.
Separate safety problems alleged in the lawsuit include the Dollar General defendants lacking an adequate number of surveillance cameras at the store, failing to monitor the cameras they did have set up, failing to have a proper number of employees on site at any given time and failing to heed prior warnings from authorities “and some of their own managers” about security risks.
The lawsuit also cites a heavy presence of crimes such as “shootings, assaults, muggings, batteries, burglaries, robberies and drug dealing” in the area of this specific Dollar General, including an alleged burglary at the store just one day prior to the shooting.
Despite violent crime risks being long established in the area, the plaintiffs argue, the Dollar General defendants failed to properly account for them with security measures prior to the shooting.
“Dollar General, the blood is on your hands too,” Crump said on Tuesday. “We have ocular proof, visual proof, that the presence of a security guard would’ve made all the difference in the world.”
The claims against the shooters’ parents, Maryann Palmeter and Stephen Wayne Palmeter, are based on different legal arguments.
They knew their son, who lived at their Orange Park home, “struggled with mental health issues,” the lawsuit argues. He had been confined in 2017 under the Baker Act — a Florida law that allows for temporary detention of people in mental-health crises — and held for 72 hours before he was released without further involuntary commitment, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said after the shooting.
“With an obsession regarding firearms and violence, and living in a room filled with prescription medications and alcohol, as well as firearms, [the parents] knew that [their] son was a ticking time bomb,” the lawsuit alleges, also claiming they knew he “struggled with alcoholism.”
The lawsuit included photos that show “artwork that glorified death” in his room. One jarring, digitally altered photograph depicts a video game loading screen, with two real images superimposed on top of it, showing one of the Columbine High School shooters and showing the dead body of a 2-year-old Syrian refugee. A few other photos show gun-focused guides and books such as “The Christian and his Machine Gun: A Biblical View of War, Guns, and the Military” stacked on his carpet. Three more show liquor and beer bottles.
The lawsuit argued the parents “owed a duty of care to the general public to reasonably supervise” their son with precautions for “foreseeable criminal acts,” such as “informing authorities about the threat posed by” their son and preventing him from owning firearms.
Quantavious Laguerre, the brother of A.J. Laguerre, said that if someone is held accountable, “that would bring me a little peace.”
Charlie McGee covers poverty and the safety net for The Tributary. He’s also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and worldwide. McGee may be reached at charlie.mcgee@jaxtrib.org. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.
