Eleven Years After the Sandy Hook Massacre, a $73 Million Settlement

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at settlements in two high-profile lawsuits — one filed against the company that manufactured that AR-15-style rifle used in the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut 11 years ago, the other filed against Prince Andrew by a teenage victim of his friend, Jeffrey Epstein.

The families in the Sandy Hook settlement said it was worth $73 million. The money, to come from insurance companies for the gun manufacturer Remington, was believed to be the largest payout ever in a liability case against a gun maker.

But beyond the money, the settlement represented a major setback for the gun industry. The lawsuit had used a novel legal strategy to sidestep a federal law that shields gun companies from litigation. The families’ lawyers argued that the gun maker had violated Connecticut’s consumer protection law by promoting its products in ways that appealed to so-called couch commandoes and troubled young men like the 20-year-old gunman who stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, killing 20 first graders and six adults.

Similar consumer protection measures in other states, including New York, could provide a framework for families of victims in other mass shootings.

[Sandy Hook Families Settle for $73 Million With Gun Maker Over Massacre]

“This is an important win for victims of gun violence and the movement to hold the gun industry accountable,” said Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel for Brady, the gun control group formerly known as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which has been suing gunmakers and dealers since the late 1990s. “It sends a powerful message to these executives — even with your special protections, you can and will be held accountable for gun violence.”

Lawyers for the company did not immediately return calls for comment. The agreement was disclosed in documents filed in Connecticut Superior Court on Tuesday that did not provide details of the settlement, including the amount the families would receive. And the settlement will be paid by insurance companies that had represented Remington because it is in bankruptcy. As a result, gun industry officials said that the decision to settle “was not made by a member of the firearms industry.”

Remington had proposed settling with the families for $33 million last year as a trial date approached. Josh Koskoff, the lead lawyer for the families, said in July that they had rejected the offer because of its “glaring inadequacy.”

The families had maintained that Remington marketed the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle as a weapon of war, using slogans and product placements in violent video games played by troubled young men like the Sandy Hook gunman. One ad showed a photograph of the rifle with the words “Consider your man card reissued.”

The families had said that a central goal of the lawsuit was to pry open the industry and expose it to more scrutiny. Remington had resisted turning over any internal documents, arguing that the families had not presented a legal justification for seeking them.

But lawyers for the families said on Tuesday that Remington had agreed to release thousands of pages of internal company documents, including possible plans for how to market the weapon used in the massacre — a stipulation that had been a key sticking point during negotiations.

Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed, said the documents included in the settlement were crucial — and “paint a picture of a company that lost its way, choosing more aggressive marketing campaigns for profit.”

Weather

Expect a sunny day with temps reaching the mid-40s. In the evening, will be partly cloudy with temps in the low 40s.

alternate-side parking

In effect until Monday (Washington’s Birthday).

Prince Andrew settles sexual abuse lawsuit

Weeks before he was to be questioned under oath, Prince Andrew settled a lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of raping her when she was a teenage victim of Jeffrey Epstein.

The financial terms of the settlement, announced in a court filing in Manhattan, were not disclosed. The deal saved Andrew, the disgraced second son of Queen Elizabeth II, from having to go to trial. Giuffre had claimed that Andrew, known as the Duke of York, sexually abused her when she was under 18 at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The lawsuit had cast a shadow over the royals as Queen Elizabeth was celebrating 70 years on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch. Last month she stripped Andrew of his military titles, and Buckingham Palace said he would no longer use the title “His Royal Highness.”

Andrew, in a joint statement by the two sides that was attached to the court filing, did not admit to any of Giuffre’s accusations but said that it was “known that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years.” He also said that he “regrets his association with Epstein and commends the bravery of Ms. Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others.”

That characterization of Giuffre was noticeably different from the way Andrew’s lawyers had described her when they moved to have the lawsuit dismissed last fall. The lawyers said then that “Giuffre has initiated this baseless lawsuit against Prince Andrew to achieve another payday at his expense and the expense of those closest to him.”

The latest New York news

• Ignored by the media and pushed aside by the police, families and supporters of Black women are building their own missing persons operations online.

• A wealthy Connecticut woman pleaded guilty to sex crimes for making secret videos of minors at her home in Connecticut.

Art bound for space

Eva Petric creates site-specific artworks and oversees their installation. She was on hand with the technicians and the riggers when “Collective Heart,” a translucent work made of lace, was hung over the high altar at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan several years ago.

She cannot supervise the installation of two of her latest works. For now, anyway, she cannot go where they are going, even though they are going only about 250 miles, roughly the distance from Times Square to Rochester, N.Y.

They are heading to the International Space Station, as a prelude to establishing an art gallery in an even more distant place: the moon.

The Moon Gallery Foundation, a nonprofit that says its partners include the European Space Agency, will announce plans for the mission to the space station and the lunar gallery today in Manhattan. “Reaching low Earth orbit on our way to the moon is the first step in extending our cultural dialogue to space,” Bernard Foing, the chairman of the foundation, said in a statement. He was the lead project scientist of the European agency’s first moon mission, a satellite that orbited the moon in 2003.

The foundation said the gallery, a collection of 65 works, would be launched on Saturday on a rocket bound for the space station. The foundation said it was collaborating with Nanoracks, a company that arranges for experiments to fly to the space station. NASA’s description of the mission said another part of the Moon Gallery would be photographs and videos from a new camera that could be used on future space platforms.

There are space constraints in space, so the artist had to think small — each compartment in the grid-like rack being sent to the space station is slightly more than a half-inch wide and a half-inch tall. Petric, who divides her time between New York, Vienna and the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, said she was happy to bid her two tiny works goodbye, though she said she regretted that she could not be on the space station when they arrived.

What we’re reading

• On Long Island, the Suffolk County police created a task force to solve a 10-year-old mystery involving bodies found in the Gilgo Beach area.

• What’s it like to wear a mask in school all day? Chalkbeat turned to more than a dozen “experts” — students.

METROPOLITAN diary

All-night parking

Dear Diary:

One night, after searching for parking in Washington Heights for almost an hour, I reluctantly decided to put my car in a garage.

Finding one, I asked the attendant if they took cars overnight.

Yes, he said, for $40.

As I reached into my wallet, the attendant motioned toward me and then pointed to a car parked in a spot just outside the garage entrance.

Although he didn’t speak English very well and I didn’t really understand what he was saying, I realized that the car he was pointing to was his. It soon became clear that he was offering me his spot instead — for $25 in cash.

A few minutes later, I was happily walking to my destination, and he was enjoying the fruits of an enterprising approach to solving my parking problem.

— Jean Molot

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Sadiba Hasan, Olivia Parker and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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