“My pastor wants to send flowers to family,” the Facebook message, sent over three years ago to Trinice Sampson, reads. “Can you connect me to someone in the family?”
Sampson was in the Los Angeles area with her cousin, Tamiko Loyd, whose son, Michael Myvett, had died three days earlier when a FedEx tractor-trailer rammed their charter bus on a Northern California freeway, killing 10 and injuring dozens more. Since the April 2014 accident, Sampson had fielded phone calls, Facebook messages, and countless solicitations from people who wanted to offer assistance, send flowers and more.
This message, from a man named Taylor Greene, seemed earnest. Sampson knew the family would need money for funeral arrangements and had already created a GoFundMe account. She wrote back with Myvett’s grandmother’s address and told Greene to send her a friend request if he wanted day-to-day updates on the family.
But after numerous letters to law enforcement agencies, state bars and mega churches, three years later Sampson believes that a Texas law firm accused of improperly soliciting Woodmore Elementary crash victims in Chattanooga created that Facebook account to contact her family members and induce them into signing up with their employees.
She said Nuru Witherspoon and Alphonso McClendon, of the personal-injury Witherspoon Law Group in Dallas, Texas, introduced themselves as representatives from a mega church, lavished her family with gifts, promised them a house, personal vehicles and $100,000, tried to get Loyd to sign legal documents that were missing key details and contained high interest rates, and then convinced Loyd to travel to Texas so she could sign on with the firm for a wrongful death lawsuit against FedEx, against other family members’ advice.