Late last month, a Georgia jury awarded more than $46 million to the families of two female workers, Tanya Wilson, 47, and LaTonya Brown, 36, who were shot to death by a co-worker at a Philadelphia Kraft Foods plant in 2010. Instead of filing a lawsuit against Kraft, the victims? families opted to go after the company that provided security at the factory, Georgia-based U.S. Security Associates (USSA).

Wilson and Brown were killed in 2010 after Yvonne Hiller, a third employee at Kraft, was suspended from her job and returned shortly after armed with a .357 magnum. Hiller also shot and injured a third co-worker.

Hiller was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.

A lawsuit was filed against USSA stating two security guards failed to protect the people at the Kraft plant during the shooting. A supervisor was instead caught on surveillance video running and hiding in a boiler room, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also accuses the guards, who were unarmed at the time, of failing to warn employees in the plant in the several minutes it took Hiller to walk to a third floor mixing room where Wilson and Brown worked.

The guards called 911 but didn’t take any additional actions such as contacting Kraft management, using a radio to communicate with the employees or sounding a warning through the plant’s public address system, according to the lawsuit.

“The verdict is an important message to U.S. Security that their guards can’t simply run away in the middle of a crisis,” said Shanin Specter, of Kline & Specter, P.C., who represented the Wilson and Brown families along with Dominic Guerrini and Patrick Fitzgerald. “They actually have to act like security guards.”

A spokeswoman from USSA released the following statement on the verdict:
“U.S. Security Associates believes that its personnel on duty on the night of the North Philadelphia shooting made reasonable decisions and acted with courage in the face of a direct threat to their own lives. In no sense did they or USSA display an intentional disregard for the safety of others. We are disappointed in today’s verdict and intend to appeal on the grounds that the evidence presented was not sufficient for a punitive damages award to be granted under well-established Pennsylvania law.
At the same time, the people of USSA sympathize deeply with the families of Tanya Renee Wilson and LaTonya Sharon Brown, the two women who died in the shooting, and with Bryant Dalton, who was severely wounded.”

Whether the best control is security training, security officers, Tasers, armed officers, access control systems, active monitoring, background checks, or some other strategic control, the basic controls need to be in place 100 percent of the time. Doing regular security risk assessments gives security program directors the opportunity to review both the control implementation levels and the threat level, so security can continually be improved so that an organization is ready for whatever may happen.