Eva vs. Goliath
Eva Rowe was a wild child from a mobile home in the Louisiana woods until March 23, 2005, when her parents were killed in a refinery explosion in Texas City. Then she became a wild child with a fancy house in Beaumont and a dogged crusader who forced BP to own up to the truth about what happened that day.
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In September 2005 she had met and fallen in love with a young man from the Dallas area and left her new house in Beaumont to move in with him and start fresh. The two were in Louisiana when Hurricane Rita hit. According to the police report, they pulled into a gas station in Natchitoches with two 55-gallon drums in the back of a pickup truck and started to fill them up. The attendant told them he couldn’t sell that much gasoline because of the state of emergency. He was also worried about a possible explosion with so much gasoline vapor pooling around the truck. Eva started to argue, and her boyfriend pushed her back into the vehicle, but as they were pulling out of the station, she pointed a 9mm pistol at the attendant. As soon as they were gone, the attendant called the police, who caught up with the pair back across the Texas line. The police found crystal meth in the car, and Eva was charged with assault and possession of a controlled substance. The charges were later dismissed.
Only a month later, speeding along the highway near her home in Rockwall, Eva smashed up her new $85,000 BMW and was taken away in an ambulance with head and neck injuries.
By May 2006 things had gone south with the new boyfriend. “He didn’t support my cause,” she told me. “He just wanted me to settle and take the money. If you weren’t for my case, you were against me.” According to a police report, there had been an argument, presumably over money. The boyfriend told the officers who arrived at the scene that Eva had agreed to give him one percent of her settlement. When she went back on her word, he threatened to leave her. He also accused her of punching him in the face and threatening to kill him. No charges were filed.
In August the police appeared at the Rockwall home again. This time, the boyfriend had attempted to pack up his belongings. He told police that Eva said she would hurt herself and then call the police and claim it was his fault. She was charged with resisting arrest and possession of an ounce of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
Then the September trial date was postponed, and Eva went into an even deeper decline. On September 4, two state troopers stopped a white Dodge Charger in Jasper County for speeding. The driver of the car was a childhood friend of Coon’s named Ronald Hargroder, one of the many people Coon had charged with keeping an eye on his client. When the officer, Arnold Tevis, spied an open container in the car, he asked Eva and Hargroder to step out.
Eva’s speech, Tevis reported, “was raspy and slurred.” He looked in her purse and found plastic bags and an empty prescription bottle for Xanax, which Eva said she took for panic attacks. Noting her growing uneasiness, Tevis then asked to search the car. Eva agreed. He opened a pack of cigarettes and found several joints. Eva was arrested and handcuffed. When she complained of a panic attack, Tevis called an ambulance.
He then discovered two small bags on the ground beside Eva. One had an image of a devil printed on the front and a white powdery substance inside, which Tevis suspected of being methamphetamine. Another plastic bag had two tablets he could not identify. She was taken to jail in Jasper.
All the charges against Eva have since been resolved, but at the time, the defense’s intention to use this information gave her no small amount of anxiety. Still, anyone who thought it would deter her from pushing her case was sorely mistaken. If anything, she only grew more aggressive. “How can you live with what you’ve done?” she asked BP’s attorneys at her deposition. She wanted to go to London, to show her parents’ autopsy pictures to Lord Browne. “I couldn’t believe a man who got knighted can kill people,” she said to me. “I wanted to be like, ‘Look what you did to my mom. How does that make you feel?’” When she ran into the former manager of the Texas City plant at a hearing, she refused to shake his hand. “Brent,” she said to her lawyer, “you’d better get this man away from me or I’m gonna stab my high heel through his foot.”
It is the opinion of some defense lawyers that Coon realized in the summer of 2006 that a settlement sooner rather than later would be in the best interest of everyone. Just as BP would suffer irreparable damage in a trial, so too might his client. All the other cases involving deaths had been settled by then; Eva was the sole holdout, and though she remained committed, the case was clearly taking its toll.
As the fall wore on, Coon kept exploring with the defense ways to make a settlement that would be a win-win deal for everyone. Both sides agreed that a contribution to the community—in addition to Eva’s private settlement—might bring about an end to the case. But for Coon, a full, public release of the corporate documents he and his client had been able to read was nonnegotiable; BP was just as adamant about keeping those pages private. “We basically were playing chicken,” Coon admitted.
And so the sparring continued: Just before the new trial date, in early November, Eva appeared with her attorney on 60 Minutes in a segment that was devastating to BP. The company tried to recover by sending out thousands of letters addressed to “BP Texas City Neighbor,” claiming substantial improvements in the safety features of the plant and revealing plans to spend $1 billion on improvements in the next five years. Coon responded by charging BP with attempting to influence the jury pool on the eve of the trial.
By then, both legal teams had reserved floors in the best Galveston hotels and were ready for battle, but two weeks before jurors were to be selected, BP finally began to waver on the public release of its documents. Coon and William Noble, the company’s litigator, spent more and more time trying to work out a settlement down at Garza’s Kon Tiki Lounge, near the seawall. On the night before jury selection was to begin, the attorneys, well fueled on alcohol, tried to make peace one more time. The issue of a large charitable contribution came up again. What about money for the process safety school at Texas A&M University? Noble suggested. Or a contribution to the burn unit at the University of Texas Medical Branch?
Coon was receptive to the idea of donations, but he kept hammering Noble on the matter of disclosure. Finally, BP threw in the towel. The rest of the night was spent, Coon says, “getting closure”—East Texan for “drinking a lot.”
At four o’clock in the morning, Coon called his client. “We got what we wanted,” he told her. BP would donate $12.5 million to the Blocker Burn Unit at Galveston’s University of Texas Medical Branch; $12.5 million for the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M; $5 million to the College of the Mainland, in Texas City, for a safety program; $1 million to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital (James and Linda Rowe’s favorite charity); and $1 million to Hornbeck High, where Eva’s mom had been a teacher’s aide. BP also created a fund for victims of the explosion and pledged to match donations up to $6 million. And, of course, the documents would be made public so that everyone would know not just how but why James and Linda and thirteen other people had died. (Later, OSHA fined the company $21.3 million, the largest fine of its kind but still a pittance when compared with BP’s $4.66 billion net income for the first quarter of 2007. On the other hand, the Justice Department is considering criminal charges.) Eva’s personal settlement is confidential, but it was rumored to be comfortably in the multimillions. Her overwhelming emotion at receiving the news was one of relief. Even though it was early in the morning, she got out of bed, got dressed, and got herself ready to face a brand-new day.
Soon after, Coon started posting the hard-won BP documents on a Web site called texascityexplosion.com, with an easy link to his own firm and videotaped explanations of the issues courtesy of, well, him. After a little downtime, his band played with ZZ Top in Beaumont on Easter weekend of 2007. Coon is fighting to take Lord Browne’s deposition, despite his departure from the company, and still has about two hundred clients with injury cases and other grievances left to settle.
Eva is more ambivalent about their success. By early spring, she was ready for a rest—“I haven’t really had time to grieve,” she told me—but is happy to have brought about some change. Sometimes she talks about going back to school, maybe for a law degree; other times she begs to be nothing more than a normal 22-year-old. She isn’t a person desperate for public adulation. “You don’t know how good I’ve had to be,” she told me wearily. On Easter weekend, she snuck into Hornbeck late at night to visit her parents’ graves but was gone before sunrise. There was a shiny new padlock on the trailer that was once her home, and the grass was high in the yard, though some deep-purple gladioluses were in bloom.
Eva’s voice is sweeter now, and some of the hardness has left her face. In early May I asked her if she ever thinks about what her life would have been like if there had been no explosion, and no fight, and no millions. “Oh, wow,” she said. “I think about that a lot, but I can’t paint a picture of it. I probably would have never left my mom, because she was my best friend.” She thought about her answer for just a minute more and then added, “I never had any idea of what I would have been or what I wanted.”
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