Seattle PI Getting Sued

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on November 25, 2008). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

This isn’t much of a surprise:

An operator involved in a deadly Bellevue crane collapse has sued the Seattle P-I, saying the paper defamed him by printing details of his criminal history.

Warren Yeakey, the 36-year- old operator who was injured in the November 2006 collapse, filed the defamation suit in Pierce County Superior Court earlier this month. In court documents, Yeakey says the paper wrongly intimated that his arrests and convictions somehow contributed to the collapse.

“He felt like he was vilified falsely,” said Matt Renda, a Tacoma attorney representing Yeakey. The story, Renda added, “created an incorrect or false implication that operator error … was a contributing factor to the downing of the crane and the death of (Matthew) Ammond,” a Microsoft Corp. patent lawyer who was killed in the collapse.

I knew at the time of the collapse that the reporting of the accident was not the PI’s finest hour.

…when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

I wonder if the PI would be getting sued if they’d printed some form of apology or retraction at the time?