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The Lawsuit
One week later there was a standing-room-only crowd of 1,500 at the memorial service at St. Edward's Church in Bloomington. School kids and neighbors lined the curb across the street holding up hand-lettered signs: "You're Our Hero" and "God Bless You." A homemade video of the ceremony shows Deena, obviously still in shock, almost teetering, reaching out to put a hand on her young daughter's shoulder.Since then, the Burnetts have set up the Tom Burnett Family Foundation in Tom's memory, and he has been the posthumous recipient of a long list of awards: scholarships in his honor at Pepperdine, Saint John's University, the University of Minnesota; burial with honors in the National Cemetery 15 minutes from where he grew up; flagpoles erected in his name at Thoratec and at Hyland Park, where he rode his bike as a boy. The west Bloomington post office now bears his name, and Mary Margaret was instrumental in commissioning Patrick Wilson to create an arresting sculpture in her brother's honor at Bloomington's Mall of America.
None of those tributes diminish the survivors' pain, though. Deena speaks of her daughters' continuing sleepless nights, and of listening to them say things such as, "You liked it when Daddy kissed you, didn't you, Mom?" Tom and Beverly can still lose their composure describing trips Tom Jr. took them on to Korea, Paris, Costa Rica. In the months after her brother's death, Mary Margaret had recurring nightmares that she was fighting terrorists and saving his life. Older sister Martha says, "Our whole lives are divided into before Tom died and after Tom died."
It was Tom Sr.'s idea to do something constructive with that pain, to file a lawsuit against those believed to have funded the 9/11 hijackers, a decision attorney Motley describes as "quite extraordinarily ingenious." In late 2001 Tom Sr. approached Jeff Spragens, a Miami-based businessman and someone he and Beverly had known since before Tommy was born. "I want to get the sonsabitches who did this," Burnett told his friend, and Jeff's first response was, "You have to try to forgive. You have to calm down."
Burnett would not be dissuaded. Eventually, Spragens promised he would try to put the Burnetts in touch with a good lawyer. It turned out that his wife, Joy, had lived next to Ron Motley when he was a young attorney, and it was Joy who approached Motley and set up the phone call that led to the first meeting. Of that five-hour discussion in the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton, Motley says, "The emotional energy in the room was extraordinary. Afterward I said to Jodi [Flowers, another member of the firm, who was also in the room], 'I don't care where this case leads; I'm going to do it.' "
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