Survivors of 2017 Northern California massacre sue homemade ‘ghost gun’ suppliers

In constant pain and still struggling emotionally, Troy McFadyen wonders if he’ll ever fully recover from the massacre in rural Tehama County three years ago that left his wife and five other people dead and more than a dozen wounded.

Suing people he holds responsible is a start, he believes.

McFadyen and other survivors of the November 2017 shooting rampage in the small community of Rancho Tehama are suing the so-called “ghost gun” industry — a group of companies that supply parts and do-it-yourself kits used to assemble homemade weapons.

Law enforcement officials said Rancho Tehama gunman Kevin Janson Neal made at least two of his weapons, including an illegally modified Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, out of mail-order parts.

“The whole purpose of the ghost gun business is for people who have no business having guns,” said McFadyen, who was wounded in the shooting and lost his wife Michelle in the shooting. “I believe in freedom but we’ve got enough nonsense going on. ... It’s something that should be regulated to some degree.”

The claims against the ghost gun industry are at the core of two wrongful-death and personal-injury lawsuits filed in Southern California against 13 different suppliers across the country, including five in California.

The lawsuits say ghost gun parts companies know that they’re “supplying criminals, killers, and others whose possession of firearms pose an unacceptably high threat of injury or death to others.”

The suits note that Sacramento Police Officer Tara O’Sullivan allegedly was murdered in 2019 by Adel Sambrano Ramos, who faces charges of illegally making two AR-15 style rifles and of converting three other AR-15 style semi-automatic rifles into machine guns.

Brady United, the national gun-control advocacy group, called the two cases the first-ever lawsuits filed against the ghost gun industry. The suits were filed in November 2019 but have sat mostly dormant while the victims’ lawyers served the parts suppliers with copies of the lawsuits, said John Lowy, a lawyer with the Brady organization. The cases weren’t publicized until this week.

The lawsuits acknowledge that it remains unclear where Neal got the parts he used to make his assault weapon. But Lowy said the nature of the ghost gun industry makes it legally possible to sue the major players.

“They’re supplying the criminal gun market,” Lowy said. “The ghost gun industry chooses to sell what effectively are firearms to people without restrictions or paperwork or serial numbers.”

Lowy said there’s legal precedent for targeting an industry when it isn’t clear who’s at fault for specific wrongdoing — a concept known as “market share liability.” The most prominent case involves a 1980 California Supreme Court ruling against manufacturers of a synthetic estrogen drug compound used by pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. The drug left some of their daughters with cancer.

Marketers of ghost gun kits and parts are pushing back against the Rancho Tehama lawsuits.

Cody Wilson of Texas-based Ghost Gunner Inc., one of the defendants, described the suits as “attempts to confuse the public and frustrate the lawful purpose of making your own firearms in California,” according to the Associated Press.

Efforts to reach officials with four of the California companies, RBTacticalTooling.com, 80PercentArms.com, GhostGuns.com and JTactical.com, were unsuccessful. A man representing himself as a spokesman for the fifth California company, USPatriotArmory.com, wouldn’t comment.

“The only individuals who should be held accountable for criminal acts are the criminals themselves,” said Amy Hunter, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association.

California tries to restrict ghost guns

Federal officials have been trying to crack down on ghost guns for years, and California elected officials have been trying to regulate them.

In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 357, which required firearms owners who are assembling a gun that lacks a serial number to apply for a number from the state Department of Justice starting in 2019.

Three years later, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 879, which attempts to regulate the selling of certain kinds of firearms parts used to build or modify the weapons.

The bill requires buyers of these parts to go through a similar process to the state’s new ammunition background check program. Starting in 2025, those buying or transferring the parts must go through a licensed retailer that conducts a background check for a small fee.

This year, Newsom signed a bill moving the deadline up to July 2022.

Meanwhile, in September state Attorney General Xavier Becerra sued the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, demanding that the feds treat the do-it-yourself kits the same as fully manufactured weapons, subject to background checks, serial numbers and other regulations.

“These firearms are indistinguishable from the serialized firearms that are regulated under state and federal law. And they’re every bit as lethal,” Becerra said. “Anyone can make them. Anyone can carry them. Anyone can fire them.”

President-elect Joe Biden made it a campaign pledge to prohibit all online sales of firearms, ammunition, kits and gun parts, though he’ll face still resistance from Republicans in Congress.

Ghost gun rampage followed months of red flags

The Rancho Tehama shooting was a tragedy months in the making.

Neal, whom family members said was delusional, was engaged in a lengthy and increasingly violent feud with neighbors he accused of running a meth lab, though the sheriff’s office said there was no evidence they did.

Eventually, he killed his wife, Barbara, and buried her beneath their ramshackle motor home. The next morning, brandishing four guns, he killed two of his neighbors, and then drove to the Rancho Tehama elementary school and shot out the windows in an attempt to kill one of the neighbor’s sons.

He then killed two other people near the school before he shot himself to death as law enforcement officers were closing in, bringing the total death toll to six.

Residents of Rancho Tehama later told The Sacramento Bee that sheriff’s deputies ignored their pleas for help in the months leading up to the bloodbath, dismissing accounts that Neal was terrorizing the neighborhood by shooting weapons and violating a restraining order that prohibited him from having weapons.

At one point, Neal stabbed one of his neighbors, and deputies seized his rifle, but the criminal case against him was dismissed.

After the stabbing, a judge granted the restraining order, mandating relinquish any weapons. He turned in a handgun, court records show. Sheriff Dave Hencratt told The Bee after the shooting that Neal didn’t hand in his homemade rifle or his other weapons.

Hencratt said there wasn’t enough evidence to serve a warrant that would have allowed deputies to search his home, a claim some critics told The Bee didn’t add up in light of the stabbing. Records showed neighbors called the sheriff’s office numerous times about Neal’s erratic and menacing behavior.

Five separate lawsuits against the Tehama Sheriff’s Office over deputies’ alleged inaction are pending in federal court in Sacramento.

McFadyen said he still suffers from the trauma of his wife’s death and the physical effects of the leg wounds he suffered.

“I’m ambulatory but that’s about it,” he said. “I still have a hole in my leg. ... I get infections every three or four months. ... I’m in constant pain.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Survivors of 2017 Northern California massacre sue homemade ‘ghost gun’ suppliers."