Law Firms
Law Firm Mystery: Second Lawyer Dies at Young Age, Slaying of Third Unsolved
Posted Aug 13, 2008, 10:10 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Updated: The law firm Boggs, Avellino, Lach & Boggs in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton has been hit once again with the sudden death of one of its lawyers.
Vincent Venker II died at the age of 51 on Sunday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. The cause of death has not been determined. He worked at the same firm as Ernest Brasier, who was found shot to death at the firm the week before Christmas in 2006. The case remains unsolved.
Another one-time lawyer at the firm, Daniel Bennett, died in September at the age of 48. The medical examiner attributed the cause to heart disease. Beth Boggs, name partner at Boggs, Avellino, Lach & Boggs, says Bennett was working at a St. Louis law firm at the time of his death and had left Boggs Avellino about a year before, a few months before Brasier's murder.
An article published by the Post-Dispatch in 2007 said Bennett had "abruptly left" the Boggs firm in 2007, gotten divorced and left the country, but he was not a suspect in Brasier's slaying.
Brasier was in Bennett’s former office when he was killed, Boggs says, but she refused to speculate on whether Bennett was the gunman’s intended target. “We’ve been told [Brasier] was using the computer in that office” at the time of his slaying, she said.
Brasier's widow, Pat Holtmeier, told the Post-Dispatch that the death of another lawyer from the firm raises troubling questions. "There's something crazy going on at that law firm," Holtmeier said. "It's almost like a John Grisham novel."
But Boggs tells ABAJournal.com that Venker apparently died of natural causes. “We have been told that Mr. Venker died of an apparent heart attack," she said. "The police are not investigating the circumstances of his death. Why [Brasier's] widow chose to make her comments, I can’t comment on that.”
Boggs Avellino is a civil defense firm. Venker has handled defense-side environmental, pharmaceutical and asbestos claims, the firm’s website reports.
Updated on Aug. 15 to include comments from Beth Boggs of Boggs Avellino and to include link to 2007 Post-Dispatch story.
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