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Terms of civil settlement between John Ames and Evelyn Brooks revealed

Date published: 2/22/2006

By BILL FREEHLING

John F. Ames and his insurance company paid $100,000 to settle a wrongful-death suit filed by the family of a man he shot and killed in April 2004 in Caroline County, court documents reveal.

The terms of the settlement, which had been sealed, were revealed yesterday after lawyers representing The Free Lance-Star and The Richmond Times-Dispatch successfully argued that it was a public document.

The Richmond law office of John C. Shea, who handled the wrongful death suit for the family of the late Perry Brooks, received $31,523.70 of the total settlement amount for legal services and costs incurred.

The remaining $68,476.30 went to Evelyn Brooks, who is the widow of Perry Brooks, and her two daughters. Evelyn Brooks got $22,825.44, while daughters Kimberley Brooks and Jacqueline Coleman got $22,825.43 each.

The original wrongful death suit filed by the Brooks family asked for $10.4 million. The settlement clears Ames and his insurance company, Northern Neck Insurance Co., from any additional liability or responsibility to the Brooks family.

Ames and Shea did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

Reached at home yesterday, Evelyn Brooks said she doesn't feel like it was a fair settlement, but said she agreed to it partly because she and her family didn't want to face another jury trial.

"We had dealt with so much," she said. "I got tired of dealing with this. It was just too much of a mental strain."

A Caroline jury last year found that Ames acted in self-defense when he shot and killed the 74-year-old Brooks on April 19, 2004, on Ames' Holly Hill cattle farm near Bowling Green. The trial took a week, and Evelyn Brooks said it was a difficult process.

The civil settlement does not address a lien that Ames filed in January 1989 against Evelyn and Perry Brooks.

That was filed after Ames built a fence around his 670-acre farm in the late 1980s. Using an old Virginia law, Ames billed surrounding property owners for half the cost of the fence. The Brooks family never paid the $45,000 they were charged.

The lien filed in Caroline Circuit Court in 1989 asks for the $45,000 plus interest. Depending on the interest rate used for the calculation, that amount could have doubled or even tripled in the past 17 years.

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Date published: 2/22/2006