$439,000 Settlement for Widow of Serial Killer Victim After Police Missed Chances to Stop Killer
Won by Davis Kelin Law Firm LLC.
Davis Kelin Law Firm secured a $439,000 settlement for the widow of Scott Pierce, killed by serial killer Clifton Bloomfield in 2008 after Albuquerque police failed to arrest Bloomfield for two prior murders and multiple probation violations.
What happened
In June 2008, Scott Pierce was killed in Albuquerque by Clifton Bloomfield, a man who would ultimately confess to five murders over roughly three years. Bloomfield had committed two earlier killings, of a Korean couple known as Tak and Pung Yi, roughly six months before he killed Pierce. Investigators recovered DNA linking Bloomfield to the Yi murders before Pierce died, but that evidence sat unprocessed. Instead of looking at Bloomfield, police extracted confessions from two other men, Travis Rowley and Michael Lee, for the Yi killings. Bloomfield remained free.
The gaps did not stop with the Yi investigation. Bloomfield was on supervised probation at the time and had been involved in domestic violence incidents that, under New Mexico law, required arrest. Neither the probation violations nor the domestic calls led to his detention. Katherine Pierce, Scott's widow, and her attorneys at Davis Kelin Law Firm argued that her husband would be alive if officers had acted on any of several points where the law gave them clear authority to take Bloomfield into custody.
The firm filed suit in January 2010 on behalf of Katherine Pierce, with Ben Davis among the attorneys of record. The lawsuit named the City of Albuquerque and focused on the pattern of missed opportunities: the delayed DNA processing, the wrongful arrest of two innocent men, the failure to pursue Bloomfield on probation and domestic violence grounds, and the absence of any procedure connecting the dots between his crimes.
Albuquerque's deputy city attorney maintained that officers had done nothing wrong and denied any misconduct. The city nonetheless chose to resolve the case rather than face a jury. In September 2012, the city agreed to pay $439,000 to settle all claims brought by Katherine Pierce. The city did not admit liability as part of the agreement.
Bloomfield was convicted and sentenced to 195 years in prison for his five murders. The city had previously paid nearly $1 million to Michael Lee, one of the men wrongly held for 15 months in connection with the Yi killings, in a separate settlement reached in 2011.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Davis Kelin Law Firm LLC
All Davis Kelin Law Firm LLC proven verdicts →An Albuquerque jury awarded $52 million in punitive damages against Professional Underwriters Liability Insurance Company after finding the insurer deliberately concealed notice of patient deaths and then refused to defend the physician it had covered.
New Mexico's child welfare agency agreed to a $5.5 million federal civil rights settlement after caseworkers placed an eight-year-old girl with her father, who then beat her to death, despite a documented history of abuse allegations against him.
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.