Rooney family suing state patrol, dispatcher

COLUMBUS – The family of Chillicothe attorney Annie Rooney is suing the Ohio Highway Patrol and a dispatcher who was reprimanded after the 2013 crash that killed Rooney.

Richard Rooney, Annie's father and the administrator of her estate, filed the complaint Wednesday in the Ohio Court of Claims. He is seeking a minimum of $25,000 in damages from the patrol and dispatcher Catherine A. Davis, who worked at Portsmouth Dispatch Center at the time of the crash.

In the claim, Rooney claims Davis received a complaint of a drunken driver traveling west on U.S. 50 through Chillicothe in a black vehicle at about 9 p.m. July 5, 2013. The allegation against Davis is that she failed to enter the information into the computer or to notify a trooper of the possible reckless driver. Several minutes later, another dispatcher received a call about the crash involving a black vehicle, driven by Shira Seymour, that killed Rooney.

Seymour later received eight years in prison after pleading guilty to charges resulting from the crash.

The lawsuit alleges that both Davis and the patrol "should have known that a blatant failure to dispatch an officer ... could lead to the type of harm" sustained by Rooney. The patrol also is liable because Davis was its employee, the suit claims.

In October 2013, Davis was given a written reprimand for not dispatching the trooper after the reckless driver report. She also attended additional training the week after the reprimand. Prior to the reprimand, she had no recorded discipline on her record in seven years with the patrol.

A report from the ensuing investigation into how the situation was handled showed that Davis said she started to initiate the dispatch of a trooper on the reckless driver call but that she could not remember completing the dispatch before the crash was reported. Because of time differences between systems at the patrol, Chillicothe Police and the Ross County Sheriff's Office, investigators stated they were unable to determine an accurate timeline of calls. The probe also noted that investigators were unable to substantiate allegations that Davis did not create and log the service call into the system, but they could determine that she did not dispatch a trooper.

While the report concluded that a responding unit likely would not have been able to prevent the fatal crash, it did acknowledge that a patrol sergeant was on U.S. 50 anywhere from three to eight miles away from the crash site when it happened and that Davis had believed he was on U.S. 23 rather than U.S. 50 and, therefore, too far away to respond to the reckless driver call.

The Rooney family also has a lawsuit pending against Howison LLC, the parent company of Jerry's Pizza; Stephanie Crispen, an employee of the restaurant at the time; and Seymour. The suit, filed July 10, 2014, claims Jerry's served at least one intoxicating beverage to a noticeably intoxicated person, that Crispen furnished the alcohol to Seymour and that Seymour failed to control her vehicle while under the influence.

According to online court records, the next step in that case is a telephone status conference on July 28.

Rooney's family has actively pursued new drunken driving legislation in Ohio by requiring ignition interlock on all first-time DUI offenders. The changes have been hung up by opposition from the Ohio Judicial Conference and Ohio State Bar Association.

A story about the Rooney family's fight to change the state's law is expected to appear Friday on the CBS Evening News.