One Real Estate Developer's Experience with a Failure to Disclose

Minh was a home builder.  He bought lots, hired architects to build on them and then sold the finished houses.  Minh loved building houses, carefully identified good locations and built high quality structures that enhanced neighborhood appearance and property values.  But late one night, a young man fleeing police ran onto the property and into the structure of one of Minh's unfinished houses.

A woman had called the police reporting that a man stabbed her friend with a knife.  When the police arrived, the man ran and jumped over a fence.  With police in pursuit he ran into the unfinished house Minh was building.  At this point, police allege that the man ran upstairs, and as one police officer reached the top of the stairs in pursuit, the man ran out of a room at the officer hitting him in the head with a metal bar.  The officer fired several shots fatally wounding the suspect.  Paramedics removed the body to the medical examiner's office.  The police collected evidence and then left the property.

Minh never learned of the shooting and it was unclear whether his contractor knew because he was using several contrators for finish work and the house was mostly complete.  Upon completing the house, he sold it to a buyer.  More than a year later, the buyer learned of the death and sued.  Coincidentally, home prices had dropped and Minh believed that the buyer was using the killing to try to get out of the transaction because the housing market depreciated.

Minh's case required a relatively full schedule of litigation before settlement including interrogatories, requests for admissions, depositions, subpoenas, and various pretrial motions.  After sharpening the issues through discovery and rigorous negotiation, Henry Pham was able to pressure the buyer through his attorney to settle for about one sixth of what he had initially demanded.

Henry accomplished this through a careful evaluation of the facts including an investigation into claims made by one of the buyer's witnesses who said he saw people performing a religious ceremony at the construction site a few days after the shooting.  After revealing that this claim was likely fabricated, the plaintiffs were moved to settle for an amount slightly more than their attorney's fees to dismiss the case.