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Previous Story     Next Story

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Robin Buckson / The Detroit
News

This February
2000 e-mail to Chrysler lawyers from David Tyrrell, the company's
top outside safety litigator, called Sheridan "organized,
obsessive and detailed." The e-mail surfaced in Chrysler's legal
efforts to muzzle Sheridan in court cases against the automaker.
Tyrrell concluded with a warning: "This guy is not going to go
away soon."

Minivan safety is first big task

By Bill Vlasic / The Detroit News

Robin Buckson / The Detroit News

When
Sheridan isn't flying from city to city as a consultant in
Chrysler product liability lawsuits, he fits in workouts at
the Dearborn Health and Racquet
Club.

Paul Sheridan

Age: 51; born Feb. 3, 1952.

Education: Bachelor of science degree from the State
University of New York. Master's degree in business administration
from Cornell University.

Career:

* Worked at Ford Motor Co. from 1981-84. Joined Chrysler
Corp. in 1984 as a product planner. Fired in 1994 for allegedly
leaking confidential safety documents about the Chrysler minivan.

* Sued by Chrysler for $82 million. Sheridan countersues
for damages under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

* Key witness in the 1997 wrongful-death case of Sergio
Jimenez Jr., a 6-year-old killed when he was ejected from the rear
of his family's Chrysler minivan. South Carolina jury awards his
parents $262 million in damages. The verdict is overturned on
appeal.

* Appears on ABC "Primetime" on May 3, 2001, criticizing
Chrysler for failing to install brake-shift interlock devices on
its minivans. The same day, Nancy Lou Whitt dies in a brake-shift
related accident in Nashville, Tenn.

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Part 2

After eight years as a rank-and-file planner with Chrysler, Sheridan
got his big break in the spring of 1993.

As head of the safety leadership team for the company's new minivan,
Sheridan had a unique opportunity to put his stamp on Chrysler's most
important product.

Chrysler dominated the minivan market, and planned to invest $2.6
billion on a total redesign. Sheridan's team was charged with assessing
safety features on competing models and applying them to the new van.

Meticulous and compulsively organized, Sheridan was considered a
dogged worker with a stubborn streak. A 1991 performance review rated
his leadership and problem-solving skills "superior." Another review
called him "aggressive, opinionated, and persistent."

"He is a very serious guy," said Joseph Thomas, Sheridan's faculty
adviser at Cornell University, where he earned a master's degree in
business administration in 1980.

According to Chrysler documents, Sheridan's team highlighted several
safety components in Ford Motor
Co.'s Windstar van -- anti-lock brakes, brake-shift interlock, a
fuel shut-off switch, dual latches on the liftgate.

In Sheridan's view, Chrysler had to match Ford on safety. His
convictions were fueled by a number of grisly accidents involving the
Chrysler minivan. Lawsuits charged that liftgate latches failed in
collisions, ejecting children from the rear of the van.

Chrysler defended the latches, even when the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a formal investigation in early
1994.

Sheridan pressed for stronger latches on the new minivan, but soon
found that he had minimal influence with senior executives. In October
1994, he fired off a testy memo to Theodor Cunningham, general manager
of the minivan platform team.

"SLT (safety leadership team) membership is concerned that its
approach is not fully endorsed, or a priority of upper management,"
Sheridan wrote.

Two weeks later, Cunningham disbanded the team. "Your team was not
intended to make a final decision on a (safety) feature," he wrote
Sheridan.

Fired by Chrysler amidst minivan probe

By then, Sheridan had other plans.

In the fall of 1994, Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the
Center for Auto Safety in Washington, D.C., took an anonymous phone call
from a Chrysler employee alleging defects in the minivan.

It was Sheridan.

"What he wanted to do was get information to the government about the
safety of the minivans," Ditlow said in a 1998 court deposition.

Sheridan began collecting documents to take to NHTSA as federal
regulators were turning up the heat on Chrysler. In November 1994, NHTSA
officially informed Chrysler executives that "latch failure is a safety
defect that involves children."

The minivan was under attack. Some top executives, led by Eaton,
vowed to fight any recall on the latches. Others argued that the
controversy could ruin the minivan's family-friendly image.

In the midst of the maelstrom, the trade paper Automotive News
reported that "crash-test woes" had stalled work on the new van.
Chrysler security poured over company phone records to find the leak.
They grilled Sheridan on Dec. 16, 1994. Three days later, he was
suspended.

Sheridan was fired Dec. 27 for "unauthorized disclosure of
confidential" information. Chrysler also won a restraining order in
Oakland County Circuit Court prohibiting him from disclosing "trade
secrets."

Media exposure gets attorneys' attention

Chrysler's new minivan debuted at the 1995 North American
International Auto Show in Detroit. A huge media throng packed the Cobo
Center exhibit as Eaton extolled the attributes of the state-of-the-art
van.

Meanwhile, in his small, suburban bungalow in Dearborn, Sheridan
prepared to do battle.

He denied leaking crash-test documents to the media, but Sheridan was
ready to go public.

He claimed in court that Chrysler hid minivan defects from the
government, and sued the company for damages under the state's
Whistleblower Protection Act.

After an appearance on the ABC-TV news show "20/20," his phone rang
incessantly. Attorneys clamored for his help on minivan cases. Media
attention ratcheted up with each new report of a liftgate-related
accident.

"One of the biggest mistakes Chrysler ever made was to fire him,"
Ditlow said. "He's knowledgeable and he's credible and that's a
dangerous combination for a company."

In March 1995, Chrysler announced a "service campaign" to put
replacement latches on more than 4 million minivans. By then, NHTSA had
identified 37 deaths linked to latch failures.

Replacing the latches hardly slowed down Sheridan.

His first deposition came in a Virginia case in which a minivan
driver, George Baird, died in a crash after his seat inexplicably
collapsed backward. Chrysler settled out of court.

Moreover, attorneys began tapping into Sheridan's memory of internal
meetings and memos that laid out a road map for subpoenas of Chrysler
officials and documents.

Chrysler fought back. It won a protective order to seal Sheridan's
deposition in a latch case in California -- Ornelas vs. Chrysler --
involving four passengers ejected from a minivan in a low-speed crash.

Then the company put a price tag of $82 million on its damages claim
against Sheridan. But rather than intimidating Sheridan, the move
emboldened him.

"By taking the actions they took, they made the plaintiffs' bar very
aware of my credentials," he said. "I mean, why would you sue someone
for $82 million if they didn't know anything?"

He was the star witness in a 1997 latch case in which a South
Carolina jury awarded the family of a dead 6-year-old $262 million in
damages. (The verdict was overturned on appeal and the case settled out
of court.)

And a year later, Sheridan was waiting outside a Los Angeles
courtroom to testify in the Ornelas case when Chrysler abruptly settled
the suit. He's convinced that his presence as a witness prompted the
settlement.

"Once Chrysler knew I was in the hallway, they settled," he said.

You can reach Bill Vlasic at (313) 222-2152 or mailto:[email-masked]

Previous Story     Next Story

Autos Insider

Autos Insider
index for Sunday, July 13,
2003

Safety
Firebrand Refuses to Relent

Minivan
safety is first big task

Gear-shift
safety is next crusade

Buy-here,
pay-here car dealerships find niche

Not
your father's tank of gasoline

Delphi
plans to increase investments in China

Renault
leads 2.9% gain in June European car sales

New
F-150 price to rise slightly

Ford
names new CFO; two vice presidents

Federal-Mogul
Corp. president named CEO

Customer
satisfaction, quality top Honda agenda

Delphi
to increase investment in China

Ford
insider gets CFO job

Ford
raises top price of F-150 pickup to $35,570

Federal-Mogul
appoints McClure as CEO

Chrysler
sues 3 lawyers, accuses them of filing bogus $2 billion lawsuit

Firms
rated on global warming

Delphi's
Asia-Pacific sales up 30 percent, CEO says

Honda
will boost sales with new models and revamps, new president says

DaimlerChrysler
may end stock options

DaimlerChrysler
puts Georgia plant on hold

Ford
may cut Europe output

Hyundai
may build plant in Slovakia

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