Anatomy of a Recall

When Randy Roberts first took the case, he knew the odds of embarking on yet another battle against a corporate Goliath. A small-town lawyer from East Texas, Roberts was representing the parents of a 14-year-old girl, Jessica LeAnn Taylor, a junior high school cheerleader who died in a car accident Oct. 16, 1998, on the way to a homecoming football game outside her hometown of Mexia, Texas. A friend of Taylor's mother was driving that day, and as the tread on the left-rear Firestone ATX tire allegedly peeled off like a banana, the Ford Explorer SUV veered left and rolled over.

As most tire companies have successfully done in court over the years, Firestone ruled out a problem with the tires from the start. It also fought hard to keep its consumer-complaints data and lawsuits private, saying it knew of only one accident very similar to Taylor's. But Roberts wasn't buying that. On Nov. 22, 1999, he secured a crucial victory. In a dramatic ruling, state judge Sam Bournias ordered Firestone to hand over any complaints and other lawsuits, as well as employee depositions from those lawsuits, concerning its ATX and Wilderness tires nationwide. In addition, he permitted Roberts to share the information with lawyers involved in similar legal battles. Though other attorneys, notably Bruce Kaster of Ocala, Fla., and Tab Turner of Little Rock, Ark., had been suing Firestone over the same issue for much of the decade, it was Roberts who got the first indication of the scope of the potential defect. According to him, there had been more than 1,100 incident reports and 57 lawsuits by February of this year. It took a while to grab all the spoils--Firestone incurred a fine of roughly $9,000 before handing over the testimony of some of its managers on June 22. "I was ecstatic. I could prove there was a serious problem," says Roberts. "Otherwise, all I had was a dead teenager." A trial date has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, until February of this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had received fewer than 50 complaints, compiled over the better part of a decade, about the suspect tires, in addition to tips from State Farm that it was seeing an unusually high number of insurance claims for the models. (This year, according to a State Farm document examined by TIME, the number of cases has been even higher, with 12 appearing in the first four months alone.) In March, though, 30 to 40 more complaints flooded in after a report on tread-separation accidents aired on Houston TV station KHOU.

That piqued the agency's interest. On April 4, officials there contacted Roberts. Most product-liability attorneys preferred not to get involved with NHTSA. Once a fierce enforcer of auto safety (it instigated a massive 1978 recall against Firestone), it had become just another underfunded government regulator with little power to police or penalize. Lawyers feared the agency would come up with a whitewash that companies would use in their defense. But Roberts, spurred on by the dead girl's parents, decided to help NHTSA do its job. Through an official, he let the agency know about his discovery, helping galvanize what would become the second largest tire recall in U.S. history, covering Firestone's 15-in. Radial ATX, ATX II and certain Wilderness models. "Once the cat gets out of the bag," says one of Roberts' fellow attorneys, "it's hard to put it back in."