Courthouse Employee's Asbestos Death Settles for $10 Million

Nancy Lopez spent 27 years working inside the Jackson County Courthouse in downtown Kansas City, where she was an administrative assistant to a judge. In 1983 and 1984, while she was on the job, Jackson County hired U.S. Engineering Co. to renovate and repair the Depression era building's air handling units and the pipes running through it, which were wrapped in insulation containing asbestos. Lopez's lawsuit alleged that U.S. Engineering did not follow the proper rules and procedures for that work. Reporting on the courthouse litigation describes the plaintiffs' central allegation: the air handling units kept running during the project instead of being shut down, and asbestos powder settled in thick layers throughout the building rather than staying inside a sealed work area.

Lopez was later diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer almost always caused by inhaling asbestos fibers. Unlike many workplace exposure cases, she lived long enough to bring her own claim: she filed suit against U.S. Engineering and Jackson County in the Circuit Court of Jackson County before she died in October 2010 at 56. Her family carried the wrongful death case forward after her death. The Missouri Supreme Court appointed Buchanan County Circuit Judge Patrick Robb to hear the case.

The lawsuit had been set for a lengthy jury trial. It settled first. On November 18, 2011, with Lopez's mother, Ruth Lopez, testifying at the hearing, the parties put a $10 million settlement on the record. Reports at the time put Jackson County's share at $400,000, with U.S. Engineering paying the bulk; later Associated Press reporting described the family's total recovery as about $10.4 million once payments from the county and two other contractors on the renovation were counted. Lopez's attorney, Lou Accurso, told reporters it was the largest asbestos settlement in Missouri history. “The only thing she did wrong was to come to work every day,” he said.

The settlement resolved only Lopez's individual claim. A separate lawsuit was already pending on behalf of other people who had worked in the courthouse during and after the same renovation, seeking court supervised medical monitoring rather than individual damages for each person. That case, brought by former courthouse employees David Elsea and Jeanne Morgan, took years to resolve: a trial judge denied class certification, and the Missouri Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in March 2015 in Elsea v. U.S. Engineering Co. The class case then settled separately in 2016, funding decades of diagnostic screening for thousands of people who had passed through the building.

Lopez's recovery in 2011 came five years before that class settlement and belonged to her family alone. No appeal of her settlement was reported, and the case closed without further litigation.