THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 9, 1995 TAG: 9503090412
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 123 lines
Guy Bilodeau was a convicted felon when he was hired as a maintenance man at a Virginia Beach apartment complex. One day, he let himself into a woman's apartment, then tried to rape her in front of her 7-year-old son.
Now the woman is suing - not Bilodeau, but the apartment complex that hired him, for $7 million.
``Management didn't do anything to check him out,'' says the woman's attorney, John W. Drescher.
The lawsuit, filed last month in Virginia Beach Circuit Court, is part of a trend in which victims of sexual attacks and molestations are suing their attackers' employers.
At least four such cases have been filed in Norfolk and Virginia Beach in the past 15 months. Each alleges the same thing: negligent hiring or supervision of the attacker.
It's an old legal theory being put to new use.
``I wouldn't characterize it as an unusual outbreak of some exotic legal toxin,'' says J. Hoult ``Rip'' Verkerke, a law professor at the University of Virginia. ``It's a very conventional legal theory. . .
``The most important thing to accomplish is to deter employees of that sort, to deter them from being hired into positions where they have special access to victims -what I call high-risk employment for their type.''
But a Virginia Beach lawyer who represents a real estate company in one of the lawsuits says such legal tactics are misguided.
In his case, the families of seven children who were molested by a resident apartment manager in Norfolk are suing the apartment complex's owner and management company for negligently hiring the man.
While it may be appropriate to press criminal charges in such cases, says the defense lawyer, John G. Crandley, suing an attacker's employer is just ``an attempt to get to a source of money.''
Such lawsuits are rarely brought against the attacker himself, who usually has no money, but are brought more often against the richer employer.
``It only represents those cases where a client-victim can go after deep pockets,'' Crandley says. ``There is a more appropriate target that is not addressed, and it will not be addressed legally, because there isn't any money in it.''
Sometimes, in cases where child molestation has occurred, parents are partly to blame for not properly supervising their children, Crandley claims.
``The bottom line is that civil litigation don't cure anything in this. We cure nothing,'' Crandley says. ``A victim will get a monetary award, but that's where it ends. It doesn't deter behavior.''
Not true, says Verkerke, the law professor.
``It's very important to provide incentives to employers,'' Verkerke says. ``Liability is always a negative incentive. It says if you don't keep these people out of jobs, we're going to slap you with penalties.''
The concept is not new. In fact, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld it just a few years ago in a Norfolk case against Victory Tabernacle Baptist Church.
In that case, a 10-year-old girl was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted by a church employee. The parents sued the church for negligent hiring, but the church claimed it had charitable immunity from the lawsuit.
The Supreme Court wrote, in that landmark ruling in 1988, ``Virginia has long recognized the tort of negligent hiring.''
The court cited a 1922 case involving a gateman for Norfolk & Western Railroad. The employee had raised a gate to let a car cross the tracks, then fired three shots at the car, killing a woman passenger. Her family sued the railroad.
The court ruled that the railroad could be held liable for the shooting - and was - because of negligent hiring. The company had fired the employee, but did not check its records when he came back and re-applied for a new job.
The Victory Tabernacle case raised a similar issue. In that one, the employee had a recent criminal conviction for aggravated sexual assault on a young girl. ``Indeed,'' the court wrote, ``the very thing that allegedly should have been foreseen in this case is that the employee would commit a violent act upon a child.''
A jury awarded the girl's family $500,000.
The four most recent cases raise similar issues:
In 1989, a resident manager at a Norfolk apartment complex, Charles Vette, molested six boys and one girl. At the time, Vette was on parole after serving four years for molesting a 5-year-old girl in Virginia Beach.
In the Norfolk cases, Vette was convicted of 12 counts of child molestation and sentenced to five life terms.
Each of his seven victims has filed a $5.5 million lawsuit against the apartment owners and management for negligently hiring Vette. ``A job application would have listed where he lived or where he worked for the last five years,'' said the families' attorney, Jeffrey A. Breit.
But Crandley, who represents the apartment complex managers, said the lawsuit blames the wrong people.
``The common thread between these two cases (Vette and Victory Tabernacle) is a highly questionable parental supervision of the victim, of the child,'' Crandley said. ``The circumstance that cries out for correction is the relationship between the parent and child.''
The first case is scheduled for trial in October.
A teenage boy was molested by a church youth group leader in 1991. Now he and his parents are suing Eastern Shore Chapel and the Episcopal diocese for $3 million.
The lawsuit accuses the church of negligently hiring and supervising the youth leader. The church argues it has charitable immunity. The case is pending.
A 7-year-old boy was in a bathroom at the Burger King at 3648 Virginia Beach Blvd. in Virginia Beach when an employee allegedly entered, locked the door, exposed and fondled himself.
The boy's family sued the store's owner in November for $50,000, saying the same employee had done the same thing to another boy a month earlier. ``We believe the store was notified of the first incident and didn't do anything to supervise him so he wouldn't do it again,'' said the family's attorney, Steven P. Letourneau.
The store's owner has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed. That request is pending.
The case of the maintenance man at a Virginia Beach apartment complex who let himself into a woman's apartment, then attacked her in front of her 7-year-old son.
Last month, the woman and the boy sued the management company for $7 million for negligently hiring the maintenance man, Bilodeau. He was convicted of burglary with intent to rape, and assault and battery.
Drescher, the woman's lawyer, says Bilodeau was a seven-time convicted felon when he was hired, and the apartment complex should have known. He also says Bilodeau had let himself into other apartments without the occupants' permission and without leaving notes, and management knew about that, too, yet let him continue working there.
A reply has not yet been filed in the case.
KEYWORDS: LAWSUIT SEX CRIMES by CNB