Bad Luck Streak

This story originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.

Lawyers have at times been known to overstate or exaggerate their clients’ situations when pleading their case.

But West Chester attorney Thomas Bellwoar might not be too far off the mark when discussing Sandra Peirson, whom he has represented in various legal actions for more than five years.

“Her poor life,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s like the life of Job.”

Peirson’s tribulations began at age 12, when she was shot in the face by a BB-gun accidentally fired by an uncle, leaving her blind in her left eye. They continued 30 years later, when she sat in a Kennett Square restaurant and was struck in her right eye by a bullet fired by a drunken patron. The ricochet plunged her into total darkness, completely without sight.

Most recently, moreover, Peirson lost her oldest son in a horrific accident in southern Chester County – again involving a bar patron who was visibly intoxicated but who continued to drink. Joseph Peirson was 24 when he died and had been his mother’s primary caregiver, living with her in Kennett Square, said Bellwoar.

Now, Peirson, along with her ex-husband Joseph E. Peirson, is suing the owners of the Applebee’s restaurant in East Marlborough, claiming they improperly served alcohol the driver of the car in which her son was a passenger when he was killed. The suit contends that bartenders and servers at the restaurant continued to give drinks to the driver, Shaun Collins, after he was clearly drunk, and even went so far as to help him to his car and get him behind the wheel of his pickup truck.

The suit also contends that Applebee’s did not have trained personnel at the restaurant that night who were familiar with the standards of serving patrons alcohol.

Filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, the suit is tentatively scheduled to go to trial in April. The Peirson’s are asking for more than $50,000 in damages, the minimum threshold for such actions, charging negligence on behalf of Applebee’s local subsidiaries – Rose Management Services of Newtown and Delaware Valley Rose of Kennett Square.

Under what are commonly called “dram shop laws,” Pennsylvania is among those states that allow motorists, or others who have been injured, to seek monetary damages against bar owners who serve visibly intoxicated persons who later are involved in a drunk driving or other accidents.

These laws make bar owners and alcohol servers financially liable if their customers become obviously intoxicated on their premises and subsequently injure someone or cause property damage, typically by driving drunk.

Thus, if a person has several drinks at a bar and is visibly intoxicated then gets in a car and kills someone on the way home, the owner of the serving establishment can be sued for damages.

Such suits are not always successful. One question that must be answered in the cases is just how visibly drunk the patron was before leaving the bar and getting behind the wheel of a car, and whether a reasonable person would be able to determine their level of sobriety.

Jerry Marks, whose Philadelphia law firm of Marks, O’Neill, O’Brien & Courtney is representing Applebee’s in the case, declined to speak to a reporter about his client’s position in the case when contacted Friday. “It’s coming up for trial, and I just can’t comment,” he said.

The accident which claimed Joseph Peirson’s life occurred on Oct. 15, 2005. According to the lawsuit and police reports, Collins, a friend of Joseph Peirson’s, was driving north on Route 41 in Londonderry about 3 a.m., when he lost control of the 2001 Chevrolet Silverado.

In his suit, Bellwoar says that Collins, who had a blood alcohol level of .125 when he was tested after the crash, was arguing with other people in the car, taking his eyes off the road, when he lost control.

Driving at speeds estimated later by police to be close to 100 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, the truck drove onto the northbound shoulder of Route 41, struck a mailbox, and then crossed over into the southbound lanes and struck a guardrail. The truck traveled about 50 feet along the rail, and then became airbourne.

The truck went 82 feet in the air before it hit the ground, rolled over and collided with a house at 2200 Gap-Newport Pike.

Of the four people in the vehicle, two were thrown from the cab – Joseph Peirson and Tashia A. Gambill, 21, of Cochranville, Collin’s girlfriend. Both were killed instantly, Gambill being thrown completely over the roof of the house into which the truck crashed.

A fourth person, Nichole Stahis of Kennett Square, was severely injured.

Gambill’s family, as well as Stahis, is also suing Applebee’s for its alleged negligence in serving Collins.

Collins was charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, involuntary manslaughter and related charges. He pleaded no contest to two counts of homicide and one of aggravated assaulted while DUI, and as sentenced by Judge William H. Mahon in February 2007 to nine and a half to 18 years in prison. He is currently housed at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon.

“It’s a DUI case that should be shown and taught to kids everywhere,” said Assistant District Attorney Carlos Barraza, who prosecuted Collins. “It was, for me, the worst accident scene I have ever seen.”

The case resonated with Mahon as well, but for a different reason. It was Mahon who in January 2003 sentenced Cesar Arreola-Solis to 11 ½ to 23 months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service for the shooting that left Sandra Peirson blind.

Barraza said that Mahon remembered the case and Sandra Peirson.

Sandra Peirson, then 43, was at the Birch Inn in Kennett Square the night of Nov. 11, 2001, sitting at a table enjoying a drink with the bar manager when Solis, who was drunk and who had brought a loaded handgun into the bar undetected, began waving the gun around. At some point, he accidentally fired the weapon, hitting himself in the hand, his brother, sitting next to him, in the ear and Peirson in the eye "due to an unforeseeable ricochet," according to records.

Left blind, Sandra Peirson could not work any longer and moved in with her mother. She sued the bar owners and settled the case out of court in 2003, a settlement that Bellwoar said allowed her to buy a home in Oxford, where she and her son Joseph lived until late summer 2005, when she sold the house and the pair moved back to an apartment in Kennett Square.

A month after moving, Joseph Peirson went out to Applebee’s with Collins, his friend, and the two women. He never came home. Sandra Peirson moved away from Pennsylvania, and now lives in Virginia, where she is cared for by a friend, Bellwoar said.

A Table, Some Chairs, a Bitter Memory

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008


There are no rules to the way we react to trauma. Some people become obsessed by their misfortune and it grips them whole. Some shake the evil off their coats like a drenched dog drying himself.

Years spent sitting in court rooms has shown me that the victims of crime approach their lives differently after the harm that befell them was inflicted. There are no longer any walks after dark. Strangers are greeted with distrust. Children become more clinging, or less approachable. A proud stride is reduced to a painful shuffle. But until last week, I never thought of that trauma having an impact on a room, and a piece of furniture.

Two years ago, a Honey Brook man argued with his girlfriend about the course of their relationship. During the fight, he took their 30-day-old son and held him up, dropped him to the floor and kicked him twice, in the head.

The assault took place in the kitchen of the woman’s home on Horseshoe Pike as the family ate dinner. In a letter she wrote to the judge who was set to sentence her former boyfriend for the assault, the woman remembered that location particularly.

Here is what she wrote:

“He did all of this in the kitchen where my children and I used to share so many laughs, sit down as a family for dinner and have family game night. Now we are unable to sit around the table; it’s become a useless piece of furniture. The chairs are now in the children’s room, where they sit to eat their dinner, while the table grows cobwebs.

“It’s too painful to enter the kitchen where the assault took place. Even after I tried to re-arrange it to make it less painful, we can still see the image of (her ex) holding (her child) in the air by the back of his pajamas, then being thrown to the floor.”

Her description struck me as profound, and poetic. The trauma suffered that night had an impact not only on the physical and mental well being of those involved, but on their relationship to their own environment. And the picture is immediately recognizable: what family doesn’t use the kitchen table, or counter, or island, as a place to gather and laugh and talk and play and perhaps shout a bit. It is the central place for where the business of being a family gets conducted.

And what more poison could there be than to bring violence into that space, and how could you not feel a chill every time you went back to that place?

The idea of the table itself being shunned, being cast aside, growing dust and cobwebs, drew me in. Inanimate objects do have lives, I thought. We give cars names and they grow personalities. We find a rock in the cool shade and it becomes a friend. Violence enters our homes and the furniture itself become witnesses and victims.

At the end of her letter, the women pleaded for a sentence that would bring her family justice. Here’s how she put it.

“Please let us get that phone call, knowing maybe we’ll go to sleep tonight and actually wake up tomorrow and be able to live again, start on the process of moving the chairs back into the kitchen, sitting around the dinner table as a family … and just finally get back some happiness.”