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In brief
- Family sues Walmart over firearm sale preceding employee’s suicide
- Trial examines what store managers knew about suicidal intent
- Jury weighing compliance with gun sales policies and internal reporting
- Case centers on negligence, duty of care, and corporate liability
Jacob Mace messaged a co-worker who sold firearms at their store in Southern Maryland.
“Does Walmart sell single shot shotguns?” he wrote.
“Yes,” the worker replied.
“How much is the cheapest one?”
“They’re all $99.”
The exchange, days before Mace bought a 20-gauge Hatfield shotgun and a box of ammunition to take his life, is at the heart of a 10-day civil liability trial unfolding inside a federal courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland. Mace’s family says Walmart store managers knew he was suicidal and the gun should not have been sold. Walmart says the managers didn’t know his intentions and cast blame for Mace’s death on his struggles with mental health and family strife.
Proceedings so far have mixed complicated legal questions with raw emotion.
Mace’s widow, mother and father broke down on the witness stand, as did the store’s former assistant manager.
“It haunts me every day,” his father, Mark Mace, struggled to say.
“Everybody was devastated,” said the manager, Brennan Jones, his voice filling with emotion. “He was a great kid.”
Mace died in November 2019. His family sued Walmart in April 2021, litigation that was then moved from state to federal court. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from the nation’s largest retailer.
Jurors were expected to start deliberations as soon as Jan. 21, sorting through the company’s firearm sales policies, deciding whether they were followed and weighing the differing accounts of how widely Mace’s troubles were known within the store, which is 45 miles south of D.C. in St. Mary’s County.
“Walmart should never have sold this gun,” Mace family lawyer Kevin Sullivan told jurors. “As a result of their failures, Jake is no longer with us.”
Sullivan said Mace was open about his deep struggles with mental illness. Six days before his death, on a day he wasn’t working, Mace texted a co-worker his intensions: “Slit wrists. Buy a gun.”
“Please, please, please don’t,” the co-worker wrote back, according to copies of the text shown to jurors.
The co-worker said she forwarded her text exchange to the assistant store manager and asked if Mace could be put on a do-not-sell-to list, according to her testimony.
“The managers knew exactly what Jake planned to do,” Sullivan said. “They had in writing, from his words, what he was going to do.”
The assistant store manager, Jones, testified that he never received the text message and that aside from having customers go through standard government background checks, there was no store-level do-not-sell-to list. He acknowledged being told Mace was suicidal and said he told the co-worker to call the police. Jones said that when Mace returned to the store several days later, he made sure Mace knew about the company’s counseling services.
“Walmart was not responsible for Jacob Mace’s suicide,” one of the company’s attorney’s, Kevin Schiferl, told jurors. “Store management acted appropriately at all times.”
He said Mace’s wife regularly read his Facebook messages and she saw the exchange about buying a shotgun, but neither she nor any family member reported it to Walmart. “They didn’t go to any manager and say, ‘Don’t sell him guns,’” Schiferl said.
At the store, the hourly worker Mace messaged about the shotgun did not know of his troubles, and Mace’s interest in the gun was not widely known. During the actual sale, over his lunch break, Mace was asked questions by the same worker for a standard federal background check. He stated he had never been involuntarily committed to a hospital, which was true, Sullivan said, because Mace’s psychiatric admissions were all voluntary.
Mace left the store with the gun, drove to a nearby parking lot, and ended his life.
The trial is not about the right to bear arms or sell guns or how the government should screen potential buyers. The proceedings have instead focused on specific communications among employees within a specific store, and what, if anything, Walmart should have done to halt the sale of a shotgun to one of its own employees.
“Our thoughts continue to go out to family and loved ones of Jacob Mace,” Walmart said in a statement. “We are committed to being a responsible firearms dealer.”
Mace began struggling with thoughts of suicide in middle school and underwent numerous hospitalizations through the years, according to attorneys in the case. He could also be a source of joy and loved showing co-workers photos of his young son.
“He would say, ‘Look what he did today,’” said Jones, the assistant store manager.
Mace held a maintenance position at the store. Both sides in the case have homed in on a two-week stretch in the fall of 2019 at the end of Mace’s life. It was marked by heightened tensions in his home life, at least one suicide attempt, and several hospitalizations.
A key trial debate is how much store managers knew about Mace’s hospitalizations. As jurors sift through that and other questions, they will be asked to do so under a legal framework that connects store managers with the corporation’s headquarters.
“If the managers at Walmart know things, if they have knowledge of things, that means that Walmart knows these things,” Sullivan said.
Walmart’s witnesses testified that employees must report medical absences to an outside administrator, which by design limits specific medical information going to store managers.
“There is no evidence that Walmart ever knew about any of these hospitalizations,” Schiferl said.
In particular, jurors will have to sort through competing accounts about a specific day: Nov. 9, 2019, six days before Mace’s death, when he was not working.
The differences were framed in large part by two witnesses: Jones, the assistant store manager, and Christina O’Shea, an hourly employee who received two troubling texts from Mace that day.
“I feel broken,” the first text began as Mace said he’d been suicidal all week. “Nothing helps. I just want it to end. Goodbye.”
O’Shea began crying, according to her testimony, and got on the store intercom to ask Jones to come see her. She testified Jones was in a management meeting. A supervisor was sent to see O’Shea, according to O’Shea’s testimony, and that supervisor told her to call the police. Deputies from the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office found Mace and took him to a hospital.
From the hospital, Mace sent O’Shea another text, saying he intended to buy a gun. O’Shea said she forwarded the message to Jones, an assertion bolstered when Mace’s family attorneys showed jurors a screenshot of O’Shea’s phone that included a forwarding arrow next to Jones’s first name.
“I did not receive that message,” Jones told the jurors.
Mace’s family attorneys asked Jones why two years earlier, during a deposition, he said he didn’t remember one way or another whether he received the text.
“The truth has not changed, only my recollection of the time,” Jones answered.
Another fiercely debated subject from that day: the significance of O’Shea asking Jones to get Mace’s name on a list that she thought existed and would halt sales to potential gun buyers no matter how they answered questions on the background check.
Jones recalled the request and said it prompted him to check with a human resources manager, who told him such a list didn’t exist. Walmart’s lawyers said the company had a “block list” at its corporate headquarters but it was known to only a few people there.
“At the end of the day, there isn’t a store-level block list,” one of their witnesses, Scott Braum, testified.
Lawyers for Mace’s family have highlighted the list, saying if store managers weren’t aware of it, they should have been.
Jones said that days after his exchange with O’Shea, when Mace returned to the store, he made sure to check on him.
“He was jovial,” Jones recalled. “He said, ‘I was just having a bad day, but everything’s fine.’ I was like, ‘OK, you know, we were worried about you,’ and he said, ‘No, no problems.’ … Of course he went right to his phone and said, ‘Hey, look at what he did,’ and he showed me some more pictures of his child.”
Two days later, in the same store, Mace walked out with the shotgun.
