The family members of a Utah National Guard soldier killed in Iraq while working as a security contractor say they won't continue efforts to sue the owner of the contracting company.
Carol Thomas Young, mother of slain contractor Brandon Thomas, said she wanted to leave the dispute in the hands of a "higher court."
"I don't feel that you are worth the time or emotion involved in suing you," Young wrote in an e-mail to CTU Security Services chairman Don Feeney last week.
Young's son was a Utah National Guard Special Forces soldier who took up contracting work while waiting for his unit to deploy to Iraq. He died alongside former Marine Todd Venette in a Baghdad car bombing on May 7, 2005. The families said they became suspicious of Feeney, a former Delta Force commando who had personally recruited both men, when they could not get answers about the bombing.
"We got very little information from CTU as far as an official report and the information we were getting was in fragments," said Venette's mother, Debby Casida.
Casida said insurance settlements promised by representatives of Feeney's company failed to materialize.
A U.S. District Court judge last year dismissed a lawsuit filed by Young and Casida, ruling the case could not be heard in Utah. Young's attorney said they had been planning to file the suit anew in North Carolina, where CTU is based.
But Casida and Young -- who have become close friends in the wake of the deaths of their sons -- said they agreed to drop efforts to sue altogether when they realized that little had been accomplished in three years and that many more years of legal wrangling remained.
"The lawsuit had reached the point that it was costing us more money than we had, and frankly the pain of going back to that day was too hard for me," Casida said.
Feeney declined comment, citing the advice of his attorney. In an earlier interview, he said the families were misinformed about the purported life insurance policies and that nothing of the sort was ever promised to employees of his company.
