Menards Complaint: Fill & Download for Free

My guess is that this case never gets tried. Either Home Depot and Menards go to the mat and seek to have the case dismissed, or they pay a nominal amount to make the case go away. The problem for the companies—and this is likely what the plaintiffs’ attorneys are banking on—is that this is likely not a case that can be resolved through a motion to dismiss, as the complaint almost certainly pleads valid causes of action, even if those causes of action are of questionable merit. Thus, Home Depot et al. will have to conduct discovery (document requests, depositions, engagement of experts to explain general understanding of what is meant by 2 x 4 and 4 x 4 in the relevant industries, etc.) before it can seek summary judgment, where they would have a better chance of success. This will likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps more. Thus, this may create an incentive for the defendants to write a check for a smaller amount to make this go away, although in this case, I hope the defendants fight.

In Lake Tahoe, there are a few things that we are most certainly lacking:An adequate public transport system. The buses shut down at 8 and run primarily on the main drag of Route 50.At least in South Lake, there are still long swaths of road with no sidewalk. Dangerous.There are also very few pedestrian crossings around the lake, resulting in folks jay-walking into the main drag of 50. This results in numerous deaths annually. In addition, if constructed, these could go OVER the main road and double as wildlife crossings.There is no easy way to get to the Lake from the Bay Area/Sacramento. A chain of buses and trains taking all day or night is ludicrous- it’s only a 3 or 4 hour drive.Limited local air service is an issue. Private planes fly regularly into the small airports that dot the Lake and its environs. Let’s have maybe one flight a day in and out to avoid having to schlep to Reno or Sacramento, both hours away.Aggressive parking regulations result in visitors regularly receiving high price tickets or even being towed. We need more free parking.Despite all my complaints on infrastructure, the Reno/Tahoe area has excellent outdoor recreation, live music, hospital care (especially in orthopedics), and decent shopping. The climate is mild, the air is fresh, and in general I feel blessed to live here.

I am a resident of Minneapolis. My house is less than 2 miles from the intersection where Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by asphyxiating him for 9 minutes. In addition, my house is about 3 miles from 3rd precinct police station that rioters burned down during the subsequent uprising.My wife’s birthday is May 29. Our wedding anniversary is May 31. Because my wife’s birthday is two days before our anniversary, we often call the combined celebration a “Birthiversary.”Because of timing, my wife & I celebrated Birthiversary weekend during the middle of a riot.On May 30, I spent most of my afternoon on errands trying to prepare for an eventual riot before everybody had to be back home for an 8PM citywide curfew. I had to go out to the far suburbs, to a town called Apple Valley, because most of the Home Depot stores near me were either closed or completely mobbed. I bought two professional-grade 50-foot hoses for my wife’s sister down the street and some fluorescent yellow safety vests. I couldn’t find the reflective tape that my wife put on the shopping list, but there was a Menards across the street, where I got fluorescent tape (orange and yellow) and some reflective metallic tape. On my way to the checkout, I grabbed a fluorescent yellow striped XXL shirt that I could substitute for a safety vest. I doubted that I would need to wear it more than 1 night, but I could certainly use it for a Halloween costume or an entertaining story later.After leaving Menards, I then gassed up the car & went for a grocery run at Cub Foods. (Cub Foods is relevant here, because it’s a popular grocery chain here in Minnesota, but the local convenience store near where George Floyd was murdered is called Cup Foods. That was definitely a genius marketing move by the immigrant entrepreneur who founded that store.) My wife didn’t have much of a grocery list for me, except to insist that I buy a lot of “comfort foods.” In honor of our anniversary, I bought a small little chocolate ganache cake from the bakery department to surprise my wife. For my final errand, I made a phone calls until I found a Play It Again Sports in the next town. I went in, tried out a few baseball bats, and left with an aluminum bat that was light in my hands, but the end of the bat landed with a satisfying SMACK! in my hand.I wasn’t the only one in the Twin Cities making riot preparations that day. The Hugo award winning writer Naomi Kritzer is a resident of St. Paul. She wrote a blog post, Minneapolis & Outside Agitators, that accurately conveys what a lot of locals were feeling on the eve of the Saturday riots.To know why Minneapolis is considering disbanding the local police, it helps to know a lot of local context. Sadly, there’s nothing new about local police departments antagonizing the black community. What’s different in Minneapolis is that there are a lot of taxpaying, normie white homeowners who are extremely pissed off about the police. I should know. I am one of them.Since 1999, the state of Minnesota has had a law called the “Stanek law” that preempts local municipalities from requiring police officers to live in the jurisdiction they police. The law is named after Rich Stanek, a police officer who also served in the Minnesota State Legislature as a Republican, representing the outer Hennepin County suburb of Maple Grove.Hennepin County is also the county where Minneapolis is located. After leaving the state legislature, Stanek got elected to the nominally nonpartisan position of Hennepin County sheriff, but he often used the position to push hard right Republican policies that were very out of step with the residents of an extremely liberal, Democratic leaning county. I used to see lots of lawn signs in my neighborhood in support of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, but Stanek sent Hennepin County police officers hundreds of miles away to suppress the protesters, when he was under no obligation to do so. In addition, after Trump came into office, Stanek became an enthusiastic collaborator with ICE agents against local immigrants, even though he was not required to do so and he was doing so against a lot of local opposition.Fortunately, in 2018, Rich Stanek was unseated as Hennepin County Sheriff as part of the Blue Wave that year. The sheriff is now a married gay transit cop named Dave “Hutch” Hutchinson who is committed to criminal justice reform and is trying to implement a program from Duluth designed to divert mental health cases away from the criminal justice system so that people can get the help they need.I’m glad I went canvassing in 2018 to help Dave Hutch win an upset victory over the incumbent Sheriff Stanek, because the current status quo would be a lot worse if Stanek had been in charge during the riots. Call me a “normie” if you want, but voting really does matter, if only because “Things could have been even more of a shitshow if we hadn’t got that normie Democrat in there.”Rich Stanek was a non-factor in the Minneapolis riots, but the Stanek law definitely was. The effects of the Stanek law have been disastrous on Minneapolis. Because Minneapolis is prevented by state law from imposing any residency requirements whatsoever, very few Minneapolis cops actually live in Minneapolis. According to an analysis conducted by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2017, only about 8 percent of Minneapolis police officers live in city limits. There were more Minneapolis police officers living in Anoka, over 20 miles away from the city, than there were police officers on the Anoka city police force. There were even 10 Minneapolis cops who lived in Hudson, Wisconsin, not even in the same state!As a result, a lot of Minneapolis police officers tend to view Minneapolis residents with contempt, because they can’t understand why anybody would want to live in Minneapolis. There’s even a transcript of Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union, in a police brutality case involving the interrogation of a suspected car thief, in which Kroll mocks Minneapolis residents for not being smart enough to live in the suburbs (cite).Here’s the transcript. It originally appeared in a local underground comic book that was admittedly not flattering to Mr. Kroll.If you’re looking for a convenient villain in all this, you can’t have a better Darth Vader than Bob Kroll. I mean this in only the nicest possible way, but… Fuck. Bob. Kroll.In a county where Trump only got 28% of the vote in 2016, Bob Kroll stands on stage with Trump wearing a bright red COPS FOR TRUMP T-shirt, while Trump is blowing dog-whistles about how we can’t have police brutality like we did in the old days.Just look at Kroll’s Wikipedia page. Here are some of the highlights.He has over 20 internal affairs complaints.In 1995, a lawsuit alleged that he beat, choked, kicked, and used racial slurs against a 15-year-old biracial boy.In 1996, an officer got shot by friendly fire in a botched drug raid overseen by Kroll.In 2002, the city had to settle a lawsuit for $60,000 after Kroll and several other officers were accused of excessive force against an elderly couple during a no-knock raid.In 2004, while he was off duty in plain clothes, Bob Kroll beat up several people during an art crawl in Northeast Minneapolis, but didn’t get any punishment, except for a 20-day suspension.Then, in 2007, Kroll slurred the local congressman, Keith Ellison, by calling Ellison a “terrorist” because he is Muslim.In 2016, after four Minneapolis police officers walked off their job providing security at a Minnesota Lynx basketball game, because some of the players were wearing jerseys that said Black Lives Matter, Kroll not only defended the officers, but used the opportunity to insult the team, which had already won three WNBA championships for the city by that point.As late as last April, Kroll said in interview “…I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me.”(Interestingly, after culling this list of Bob Kroll’s “activities” from his Wikipedia page, I just realized that he was largely behaving himself during the Obama Administration, but acted with a lot more impunity after Trump went into office. Funny that.)Bob Kroll knowingly pisses off a largely anti-Trump city and county by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump.If you think the list of Kroll’s general misdeeds was exhaustive, you do not know the half of it. Kroll is openly insubordinate against the civilian government of Minneapolis. When Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instructed the Minneapolis PD to put Spanish-language placards in police cars that informed immigrant residents about their civil rights when dealing with ICE, Kroll refused (cite). When Jacob Frey responded to multiple officer-involved shootings by banning Minneapolis police officers from taking “warrior-style” training, Kroll ignored it and instructed his police union members to defy the ban.Kroll is also insubordinate in opposition to Medaria Arradondo, the first African-American police chief of Minneapolis. In 2007, Arradondo and four other African-American police officers filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Minneapolis Police Department. One of the police officers who was heavily implicated in creating a discriminatory environment and a racist culture in the MPD was—you guessed it!—Bob Kroll. According to the documentation in the lawsuit, Kroll is a member of a white supremacist biker gang for cops called City Heat, and he even had a white power patch sewn into the inner lining of his biker jacket.Kroll was even insubordinate against the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. According to a letter made public by Janeé Harteau, the previous police chief of Minneapolis, Bob Kroll told the membership of the Minneapolis Police Department union that he had given Minnesota Senate Republican Majority Leader Paul Gazelka “a detailed plan of action including a range of 2000 to 3000 National Guard, their deployment allocations throughout our city and St. Paul” and that Minnesota’s Republican Senate "was going to try and run the actions that the governor has displayed he is clearly incompetent to do." In other words, Kroll was so brazen and acting with so much impunity that he was seriously considering what was basically a coup against the elected Democratic governor of Minnesota!In reality, as a Minneapolis resident, I felt much safer about the Minnesota National Guard than about the Minneapolis Police Department. If you had asked me ten years ago, if I would make a statement like that, I would have looked at you like you were crazy. As a Generation X kid raised in the 1970s and 1980s, who grew up on reading about the Kent State shootings and all about how National Guardsmen suppressed protests against the Vietnam War, I still absolutely favor the National Guard over the Minneapolis PD, because the Minneapolis PD’s reputation among locals is so bad. Minneapolis cops are a group of outsiders who are about 80% pro-Trump who are policing a city that is about 80% anti-Trump. Under those circumstances, it’s not just the black residents who see the Minneapolis police department as a hostile occupying army. It’s normie white homeowners like me too.Anyhow, what happened on Saturday, the night that the riots & unrest came closest to my neighborhood? Funny you should mention that.At the same time I was running errands for groceries and riot supplies, my wife leaned on her status as a local block leader to attend community meetings via Zoom calls about how we and our neighbors could protect our local neighborhood.My wife’s sister, who also lives on our block, had already attended another community meeting in person that gave people instructions about how to prepare for potential looting and arson, as well as all the anarchists, white supremacists, accelerationists, “carnage tourists,” and generic youth malcontents who might be driving through the neighborhood to make trouble.As the 8PM nighttime curfew came closer, I made sure to walk my dogs to make sure their were too tired to distract us, but not so tired that they wouldn’t bark if something was wrong. My wife & I turned on all the lights in the house for the rest of the night. I planned to spend the night of my 12th wedding anniversary up until 5 AM, when my wife would take over the next community watch shift.The only real incident that happened on my block was when a guy in a silver SUV started exchanging shouts and harsh words with a sign-maker who lived in a house around the corner. The SUV was blocking the street, perpendicular to the road. So it definitely looked a little suspicious, since locals were constantly hearing rumors about urban guerrillas of whatever ideological stripe getting ready to blockade roads. After the sign-maker guy started shouting at the man in the SUV, another neighborhood in a fluorescent yellow security vest also shouted to make himself known, but he kept a safe distance and did not escalate. I got out of my house with the aluminum bat I had bought earlier that afternoon, and I smacked the metal railing on my front steps so it would make a really loud sound. THWONNGGG!!The guy in the SUV was out of the car by that time and definitely a bit angry. I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded “black” and he did shout “No justice! No peace!” I regretted pissing the guy off, but since all parties were maintaining a very safe distance from each other, the guy in fluorescent vest had to shout that we were all under curfew. SUV guy objected because he was “a grown-ass man,” but then again, so was everybody else. Guy in the SUV speeds off angrily, and we hear pop-pop-pop-pop! on the next block over. It’s possible that SUV guy shot off a gun, but if he did, he must have just shot it into the air, because there were no reports of anybody getting hurt or any bullets anybody found later.My neighbor from across the street called the police about the incident, while my neighbors and I tried to figure out what happened. I didn’t see it, but there was evidently another person involved, whom none of the neighbors got a good look at, who approached the silver SUV, but who wasn’t from the neighborhood. We think it’s possible that this mystery person may have antagonized or confronted the guy in the SUV, before the neighborhood watch even knew he was there. We eventually concluded that the guy in the SUV was probably trying to buy or sell weed, which would explain why he would be pissed off by a lot of noise attracting a lot of attention, but the local unrest made it very very difficult to pull of a low-key pot deal that weekend.As for the police, they were no help whatsoever. I’m not advocating vigilantism, but it was the community watch group that kept our neighborhood safe without escalating the situation. The police sort of arrived, but when they did arrive, it was a military-like caravan of six cop cars in a row rolling down our street without bothering to stop. Our neighborhood is not racially segregated (we spent the weekend defending a black church at the end of the block), but I could see a lot of my fellow white neighbors look scared when the police rolled by. I might not be ready to start doing donuts with my Honda while “Fuck Tha Police” pumps out of the car stereo, but as Public Enemy said, sometimes 911 is a joke, and the cops only come when they wanna.