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A Louisville jury just put a $104 million verdict on a company that never showed up to defend itself.
Husky Armory never answered the complaint or sent a lawyer, and it never sat at the defense table. By the time the case reached court the company was in default, and the judge could have set the damages himself that afternoon.
Tad Thomas put the number in front of twelve strangers instead. They gave his client $4.2 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages. It is believed to be the largest verdict ever against a gun seller. It clears the $62 million a Baltimore jury returned against a ghost gun dealer last year, and the $73 million the Sandy Hook families reached with Remington in a settlement.
Thomas may never collect a dollar of that verdict. He knew it going in, and he tried the case anyway.
To understand why, you have to meet his client.
We all hear "it's not about the money" at intake, and then the call comes six months later asking about the money. Laura Herp meant it.
Laura is a licensed clinical social worker. Her son Henry had just turned eighteen: a strong student, a singer, an athlete, the kind of kid with a full house of friends. About nine months before he died he began slipping into a mental health crisis, something so new the doctors had not finished diagnosing it. Laura did what a social worker and a mother does. Counselor, psychiatrist, medication. She had reason to think she was winning, because this is the kind of crisis people come back from with treatment and time.
Henry bought the kit online, assembled it in his father's garage, told his dad it was a transistor radio, and six days later he was gone.
After the funeral, Laura went looking for an answer. She found the receipt in Henry's email, learned what Husky Armory was, and took it to Everytown Law, which litigates gun cases around the country. Everytown brought in Thomas, a Louisville trial lawyer, to try the case in Kentucky. Laura's decision will be familiar to any lawyer who has sat at a kitchen table with a grieving parent. If she could not save her own son, she would make it harder for the next company to take somebody else's.
That is a client who is not asking you to win money. She is asking you to build a record. And building a record after you have already won, when a judge would be faster and cleaner, is the case most of us are never trained to try.
Look closely at what this company actually did, because the conduct is the whole case.
A ghost gun kit is a firearm sold in pieces. Husky Armory shipped what the trade calls an 80 percent build, a Glock-style pistol sold as a near-finished kit. Federal law treats the finished product as what it is, a handgun, so the sale is supposed to run through a licensed dealer, a background check, age verification, and a serial number. Those requirements are not exotic. Every legitimate seller in the country meets them, and the Supreme Court upheld the rules covering these kits just last year.
Husky Armory met none of them. It ran no license, no background check, and no serial number, and it sold to a buyer too young to walk into a gun store and buy the same pistol.
And the company did not hide any of it. It advertised the product as everything you need to build your own pistol at home, something nearly anyone could put together. It bragged on its own channels about operating with no license, no checks, no registration. It posted memes making fun of the ATF. This was not a defendant who got caught. It published the case against itself and dared someone to do something about it.
The quiet trap in a default trial is that you relax because nobody is there to object. You reach further than you would with a defense lawyer waiting to pounce, and that is exactly how you hand an absent defendant his ticket to reversal.
Thomas tried this one like the defense table was full. Disciplined questions, arguments inside the lines, every move made for the appellate reader he assumed would one day comb the transcript looking for error. He could afford that discipline because the defendant had done the work for him.
When it was time to prove what was lost, he did not reach for melodrama. He called a public health expert from Johns Hopkins who put the stakes in evidence plainly: most people who survive a suicide attempt never go on to die by suicide, because time and distance from a firearm are what save them. Henry was in a crisis he could have come back from. He needed time. The one thing this company sold him took it away.
That is the restraint that wins default trials. Let the facts carry the weight. They are heavier than anything you can add.
Now the uncomfortable truth. Collection is a long road and a narrow one. The man behind Husky Armory is out of state, so Thomas has to domesticate the judgment where he lives, get a court there to recognize it, and grind through contested service, contested venue, and maybe a bankruptcy. There is a real chance that after all of it the recovery is small or nothing, and Thomas knew that before he ever stood up to close.
"You don't do it because you think you're going to collect $100 million," Thomas said. "That's not what happens in these cases. You do it to make change."
He gave Laura the same truth, plainly, because you owe a client that much before you ask a jury for anything. Her answer never moved. When she took the stand, and again at the press conference, Thomas got teary-eyed, and he is not a soft man about these things. He has tried more wrongful death cases than most of us ever will. What got to him was simple: a mother who did everything right, loved her boy that much, and lost him anyway.
Accountability was her recovery, and it did something a settlement never could. The morning after the press conference, the company's website went dark. As of today you still cannot buy anything on it. That did not happen because the number was big. It happened because twelve people said so, out loud and on the record, and the man behind the company understood exactly what it meant.
Most of your cases will not look like this one. But every so often the client across the table wants something a check cannot buy. They want a statement, and a trial is the only instrument loud enough to make it. When that client shows up, the reflex to take the quiet number is the wrong one.
Thomas had that client. He put it in front of twelve people, and they said what needed saying. I think he was right, and I think you would have done the same.
Adam Ramirez is Managing Editor of The Tort Report. A former editor at Bloomberg Law, Thomson Reuters, and Forbes, he clerked for a federal judge for two years after law school.
