Lawsuit against Scheels over teen’s suicide in Eden Prairie store allowed to proceed to trial

A lawsuit against Scheels over its gun safety protocols is likely headed to trial in Hennepin County District Court, three years after a 19-year-old took his own life in its Eden Prairie store after being handed a firearm for sale by an employee.

Judge Karen Janisch denied a motion by Scheels to dismiss a wrongful death and negligent entrustment lawsuit that was brought by Sarah Van Bogart on behalf of her son, Jordan Lance Markie. It sets the stage for a trial that will pit one of the nation’s largest gun control advocacy groups against a popular sporting goods chain that operates throughout the Midwest.

The complexity of the case shows in the timeline of pretrial maneuvers. The parties will have until April of next year to complete discovery with a trial date set for October 2026.

In 2022, Markie biked to the Eden Prairie store and asked to see a handgun. It was handed to him by employee William Ballantyne and Markie ran through the store, loaded the handgun and used it to kill himself.

Alla Lefkowitz, the managing director of Everytown Law, said in a statement that Janisch’s decision to allow the case to move to discovery and proceed to trial is crucial for awareness about suicide in Minnesota, which she said is responsible for 73% of gun deaths in the state.

“It is well documented that putting time and space between a person in crisis and a firearm can reduce suicidal risks and save lives,” Lefkowitz said. “We hope this case raises awareness about taking extra care not to provide a person who is in crisis with a firearm.”

The law firm Cozen O’Connor is representing Scheels and Ballantyne; lead attorney Heather Marx did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Everytown Law is the legal arm of Everytown for Gun Safety and is the largest legal organization in the United States pressing for gun safety through the courts. It is serving as co-counsel for Markie’s mother alongside attorneys from Arnold & Porter, and Jason Pederson, an attorney out of Bemidji with Fuller Wallner.

The lawsuit claimed that Scheels’ handing the gun to Markie amounted to negligent entrustment because Markie’s erratic behavior and youthful appearance should have set off warnings for the store and its staff.

Marx had argued in court that the lawsuit was “a legally unsustainable exercise in blame-shifting.” She said a commonsense view of the case would show there is no way that Ballantyne giving an unloaded handgun to Markie can be viewed as an intent to have him use it.

“We gave him a metal brick to look at,” Marx said at a hearing in January.

Attorneys for Markie’s mother argued that Scheels, as a federally licensed firearms dealer, was intimately aware of the fact that a gun is a weapon whether it is loaded or not. Ballantyne is a certified instructor on safe and proper use of firearms.

“They said it’s like a brick or a paperweight, but a functioning gun is not an innocuous object,” attorney Adrienne Boyd said at the hearing. “It’s reasonably foreseeable it will be used.”

The lawsuit argues that Markie was acting in an unusual fashion in the store, trying to open the locked gun cases and asking staff to use the telephone, which was denied. He looked young, and when he asked to see a Taurus G2C 9 millimeter handgun, Ballantyne did not ask to see any identification. The gun had no safety mechanism in place to stop it from being loaded or fired.

There have been lengthy arguments already about where the ammunition came from. It was available on store shelves and Markie was found to have stolen ammo from the store on two previous occasions before he killed himself.

The lawsuit also claimed that Scheels knew “suicidal individuals seek access to firearms” inside sporting goods stores and that Scheels is “known for having lax practices in its stores related to transactions involving firearms.”

It noted that after mass shootings carried out by teenagers, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart had adopted policies in 2018 to no longer sell firearms to people under 21, and “despite public requests” for Scheels to do the same, it did not.

Janisch’s order denying the attempt to dismiss the case argues that Markie’s mother has reasonable claims of negligent entrustment that should be considered at trial. And while federal law restricts lawsuits against individuals or stores for the sale of firearms, that law contains an exception for negligent entrustment.

In this instance, the negligent entrustment laws in Minnesota would ask a jury to consider whether Scheels and Ballantyne should have known that giving Markie the gun created “unreasonable risk of physical harm to himself and others” because of Markie’s youth, inexperience or behavior.

While Marx had argued that because the handgun wasn’t loaded, there was no intent on the behalf of Scheels or Ballantyne to have Markie use the firearm, Janisch wrote that isn’t reason enough to dismiss the lawsuit.

“This argument is unpersuasive because it adds an extra-textual intent/purpose element” to Minnesota’s negligent entrustment claim, which is strictly about supplying the weapon, not about the manner in which the weapon is used.

A comment attached to the Minnesota law also clarifies that the basis of liability for someone supplying a gun to an individual is that they “may not assume” the individual will conduct themselves properly with the gun.

Janisch shows in her order that Minnesota case law has supported this interpretation.

Lawyers for Scheels and Ballantyne had argued that the gun being unloaded also created grounds for dismissal. Janisch wrote that the court agrees it is certainly more dangerous for the gun to be loaded than unloaded, but it is not a legal bar to the case proceeding.

And while the attorneys representing Markie’s mother will need to “establish, through admissible evidence” that Scheels and Ballantyne should have known that giving Markie the handgun presented an unreasonable risk that he could harm himself or others with the gun, Janisch wrote, “the Court cannot conclude that there is no evidence” that could support their claim of negligent entrustment.

There are other issues that will be argued, including Markie being of legal age to possess a firearm in Minnesota, his youthful appearance, his alleged erratic behavior inside the store, and Ballantyne’s failure to check for identification to verify Markie could handle or purchase the gun.

Janisch notes that the “legal landscape involving gun rights in relation to persons over the age of 18, but under age 21″ is in flux. Handgun sales had been prohibited to people under 21 in the United States, but that law was recently ruled unconstitutional. A Minnesota statute that prohibited conceal and carry permits to people under 21 was also recently struck down.

However, “these federal cases were decided after this incident,” Janisch notes, “and there is no evidence that Scheels took a position at the time of Markie’s death that it was entitled under the U.S. Constitution to sell handguns to 19-year-olds.”

Janisch wrote that what Scheels and Ballantyne knew or should have known “will remain a central issue as the case proceeds through discovery.” But, she wrote, the attorneys for Markie’s mother have stated a valid claim for negligent entrustment and have a right to see their case proceed.