$21.25 Million Verdict for Family of Man Shot and Killed by an Unlicensed Guard in a Lowe's Parking Lot
Won by D'Amore Law Group.
A Multnomah County jury found a property management company and a private security firm liable after one of the firm's unlicensed armed guards shot and killed Freddy Nelson Jr. in a Lowe's parking lot, returning $21.25 million to his family.
What happened
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.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Courtroom View Network: $21.25M awarded over fatal shooting in a Lowe's parking lot·Archived copy
- 2.Jurimatic by Exlitem: $21.25M verdict for wrongful death in Lowe's parking lot shooting by security guard·Archived copy
- 3.OPB: Guard hired to protect Portland businesses wasn't firearm certified when he killed a man·Archived copy
- 4.Yahoo News: Jury awards $21M to family of man killed by Portland security guard·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from D'Amore Law Group
All D'Amore Law Group proven verdicts →A federal jury in Pendleton held two trucking companies and their drivers responsible for a 90-mile road-rage chase that ended in a fatal head-on crash, returning a $26.5 million verdict that survived the defendants' appeal intact.
An arbitration panel ordered Safeco to pay more than $1.2 million to Canby teenager Connor Zieg after a driver with a .285 blood alcohol level fell asleep, drove onto the sidewalk, and ran him over, though a policy cap held his actual recovery to $500,000.
A Wasco County jury found Mid-Columbia Medical Center negligent for keeping anesthesiologist Frederick Field on staff despite years of complaints, awarding $950,000 including punitive damages to a patient he assaulted while she was sedated.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.