A Dallas County jury found Charter Communications liable Thursday for the 2019 murder of an 83-year-old Irving woman by a Charter technician.
After less than four hours of deliberation, jurors awarded $375 million to the family of Betty Thomas and found that Charter, its telecommunication and media services branded as Spectrum, was 90 percent responsible for her death. That verdict could balloon when the same jury, having found Charter grossly negligent, begins considering punitive damages Monday.
Thomas’s four adult children contended that Charter was negligent in, among other things, not checking the employment history of Roy Holden, the technician who confessed to the murder and is serving a life sentence in a Texas state prison; in not adequately training supervisors to recognize psychological instability in field employees such as Holden; and in letting him keep making service calls after he acknowledged less than two weeks before the murder that marital and financial troubles were deeply upsetting him.
“Roy Holden does not get inside our homes … without Charter,” Ray T. Khirallah Jr., one of the attorneys for the Thomas family, told jurors in closing arguments Thursday at the conclusion of a three-week trial before Judge Juan Renteria in Dallas County Court at Law No. 5.
Holden, now 45, told investigators he killed Thomas and robbed her because “I was broke, I was hungry. … I didn’t have no money.”
Chris Hamilton, Khirallah’s partner at Hamilton Wingo of Dallas, told the jury Charter is “a nasty company” with “a culture of malice toward its customers.” Over the years, he said, Charter was made aware of more than 2,500 reports of thefts (including identity thefts) and 45 assaults (including the 2017 rape of a 72-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease) by its in-home technicians, and yet did not adequately tighten hiring, training and monitoring policies to prevent such crimes.
Charter’s attorney, Michael H. Bassett of the Bassett Firm in Dallas, began his closing argument by apologizing to the Thomas siblings for their mother’s murder.
But, he said, Charter was in no way responsible for the crime. Holden, he said, made a service call to Thomas’ home on Dec. 11, 2019, then returned and killed her the next day, when he was not working.
“He’s off the clock. He’s not working for Charter,” Bassett said.
He added that in Holden’s 14 months with Charter, the technician visited 1,040 customers’ homes “and manifested no signs of violence or aggression.” The company, he said, could not have reasonably foreseen the murder of Thomas.
“The person responsible for this is Mr. Holden,” Bassett said.
If they concluded damages were appropriate, he told jurors, the amount should be, in total, $10 million to $20 million.