Liability for the Crime of Your Employee
Founder and President, Threat Assessment Group, Inc.
Roy Holden, Jr., a cable technician working for Charter Communications performed a service call at the home of 83-year-old Mrs. Betty Thomas in 2019 and returned the next day while off duty in a company van wearing his work uniform. Holden stole credit cards from Mrs. Thomas’ purse and fatally stabbed her with a tool from his company toolbox. Holden confessed to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
Mrs. Thomas’ family filed a civil suit, and despite Holden having no prior criminal record, a Texas jury awarded Mrs. Thomas’s family $375 million in compensatory damages and $7 billion in punitive damages. An attorney for the plaintiffs told the press that Holden had raised red flags in the days before the crime; an attorney for the defense told the press that Holden alone was solely responsible for the crime.
More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the judge had reduced the punitive damages judgment to $1.15 billion and that Charter Communications would appeal.
Regardless of the merits of the evidence of liability in this case, this tragedy reminds us of a few lessons that TAG has consistently taught for the past 35 years:
Every employer needs an optimal system—with multiple entry points—for generating, documenting, investigating, and responding to reports of risk factors, warning signs, “red flags,” or pre-incident indicators.
A pre-employment criminal background check may be insufficient, and additional tools are readily available.
A higher standard of pre-employment screening and post-employment monitoring must be met by those employers who send employees into customers’ homes, just as is the case for employees who deal with children, elders, and other vulnerable populations.
If you’d like TAG’s help in achieving these goals, just ask
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