The family of a McHenry County teenager who died of a drug overdose in 2000 won a $16 million judgment Monday against drug dealers under a little-used law that holds people who sell illegal drugs liable for injuries they have caused.
With two of the three defendants in prison on unrelated drug charges, the judgment is largely symbolic, the family and their lawyer acknowledge, but they say it sends an important message.
“I’m hoping there will be less people who will be willing to take that chance to become a drug dealer,” said David Lorenz, 47, who filed the suit after his son Steven, 17, died of an overdose of an amphetamine that looked like the club drug Ecstasy.
“It really doesn’t matter whether I got money or not,” Lorenz said. “The fact is I wanted to make things better for all kids.”
John Kreamer, the family’s attorney, said the case is the first to win a judgment using the 1996 Illinois Drug Dealer Civil Liability Act, which allows anyone hurt by the sale of illegal drugs to sue.
Similar laws exist in about a dozen states, but some critics say they rarely result in any money being collected from drug dealers.
Defendants Sean Kucharski, 31, and Charlotte Cox, 46, are in Illinois prisons on drug convictions and did not appear in court or respond to legal filings in the case, Kreamer said.
The status of a third named defendant who allegedly helped deliver the drugs to Lorenz was unclear Monday.
A fourth defendant, Steven Jergensen, was convicted in 2001 of selling the drug to Lorenz but settled out of court in the civil case, Kreamer said.
Neither Kucharski nor Cox was accused of selling drugs to Lorenz, but both were named in the suit because the law allows families to sue not only a dealer involved in an overdose case, but anyone who was dealing drugs in the geographical area during the same time frame.
The Lorenz suit, which went before Judge Michael Caldwell, was one of two filed in 2002 in the first tests of the Illinois law.
The second was filed by the family of Sara Aeschlimann, 18, of Naperville, who died a week after Steven Lorenz, after the same drug was slipped into her drink by a different drug dealer.
That suit is pending, said Kreamer, whose firm is handling that case too.
