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Fighting Back
Listen to the taped conversation between Tom and Beverly Burnett and attorney Ronald Motley, and the pain you hear is as fresh and cutting as the day it began: September 11, 2001.The Burnetts' son, Tom Jr., died in the crash of Flight 93 after he and other passengers fought the hijackers for control of the jetliner. Tom and Beverly contacted attorney Motley not because they want monetary compensation for Tom's murder. They are after something bigger. In the depth of his misery, Tom Sr. had the idea of using the American legal system to expose those banks, businesses, charities and individuals who funded the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist activities worldwide. By drying up the terrorists' cash flow, the Burnetts hope ultimately to spare other families the grief they live with every day.
To carry out their plan, the Burnetts needed an experienced and indefatigable attorney with deep pockets. And fate delivered just that. Ron Motley is a flamboyant South Carolina trial lawyer best known for suing Big Tobacco and winning hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements. Nearly two years before Tom and Beverly contacted him, Motley had also lost his only son -- Mark, 27 -- due to complications following a medical procedure. In their first telephone conversation, more than three years ago, he told the Burnetts, "I have some unfortunate personal experience with these matters."
Motley cautioned the Burnetts about the risks involved in filing such a suit and taking on some of the most dangerous people on earth. In the end, the Burnetts came to the same conclusion that their son reached on Flight 93: Whatever the personal danger, they had to do something.
After that first call, Motley met with Tom, Beverly, and Tom Jr.'s wife, Deena, in a conference room of a San Francisco hotel. There they began laying the groundwork for a lawsuit that would eventually become known as Thomas Burnett Sr., et al., Plaintiffs, v. al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation, et al., Defendants. The battle was joined.
Tommy Burnett was born at St. Mary's hospital in Minneapolis on John F. Kennedy's birthday -- May 29 -- in the year of the President's death, 1963. Tom and Beverly already had an eight-year-old daughter, but had lost two children at birth, so this time Beverly's labor was induced early, and their son was born six weeks premature. For a day or two there was some question as to whether this baby would survive. He weighed less than five pounds, and his father remembers, "His legs were not much bigger around than my index finger." The Burnetts -- devout Catholics -- decided to have him baptized in the hospital.
Tom Jr. survived, and thrived. With his older sister, Martha, and, six years later, a younger sister, Mary Margaret, he lived a classic American childhood in what was then the quiet Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington. His father taught high school English. His mother dabbled in real estate but mainly prepared meals, cleaned, and helped her children learn to read at an early age by sticking signs -- B-E-D, L-I-G-H-T -- on everyday objects around the house.
One stormy Sunday morning when he was 12, young Tom went off to the late Mass on his own, taking an umbrella from the front hallway. When he returned an hour and a half later, the umbrella had been blown to bits, and his shoes and the soles of his feet were scorched. And so he became the second member of the extended family to be struck by lightning, and the first to survive: Years before, lightning had killed his grandmother's first husband.
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