photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Nov. 27, 2023.

After a fatal accident during a towing job in 2020, a Lawrence tow company owner had a simple message for his employee who was on the scene: “We need to lawyer up.”

That’s what Douglas County jurors heard in a civil trial on Tuesday, in a video from a police interview room. But they also heard the owner, Jason Kent, testify that they didn’t talk to a lawyer before a police interview. And in footage of the interview, Kent asserts that his employee will be waiving her Miranda rights, even though she had first told police she didn’t want to talk.

Kent’s company, Hillcrest Wrecker, and the employee, tow truck driver Erin VanNatta, are the defendants in a wrongful-death lawsuit by the family of Lindsay Raine, 29, of Lawrence. As the Journal-World has reported, VanNatta went to tow Raine’s Chrysler to a mechanic on Nov. 9, 2020, but the car broke free from three wooden blocks that were holding it in place in Raine’s driveway. Raine was crushed by the vehicle and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Raine’s family is alleging that Hillcrest failed to properly train VanNatta, and that VanNatta failed to warn Raine of the dangerous situation. VanNatta was never criminally charged.

On Tuesday, the second day of the trial, jurors saw a video of a deposition of Lawrence Police Officer Lindsay Bishop, who responded to the scene and interviewed VanNatta and Kent afterward. Bishop says on the recording that VanNatta volunteered to go back with her to the department headquarters, which was then at 4820 Bob Billings Pkwy., to talk about the accident.

Bishop is then shown footage of an interview room at the headquarters, where VanNatta was briefly left alone. In this video-within-a-video, VanNatta can be heard speaking with Kent on the phone.

Kent asks VanNatta whether she has given a statement to police yet, and VanNatta says she hasn’t. Kent then tells her not to talk to the police until he arrives.

“We need to lawyer up,” he can be heard saying on the phone.

Later in this footage from the police headquarters, Kent arrives and says he wants to speak with VanNatta alone, without officers or cameras present. He insists that he and VanNatta be allowed to leave the police station to talk.

Bishop says in the deposition that VanNatta had not been charged with a crime and police had no grounds to prevent her from leaving. Before Kent and VanNatta leave, the video from the headquarters shows Kent saying he wants to hear VanNatta’s account himself before she speaks to police.

“She will likely give a full report,” he tells Bishop in the video. “I just want to hear it first to decide if she will tell you every detail.”

Kent testified on Tuesday that he did not tell VanNatta to alter her story in any way; rather, he said he just wanted to protect her constitutional rights.

However, Kent testified that when they left the headquarters, he did not contact an attorney. Instead, he said they went to a nearby gas station, where they called Ryan Klamm, then co-owner of Hillcrest, and VanNatta told Kent and Klamm what happened.

About 25 minutes after they left the headquarters, Kent and VanNatta returned, and the video shows them being interviewed by Bishop and Officer Skylar Richardson. Bishop asks whether VanNatta wants to speak with police, and VanNatta first says “no.” Then, Kent interjects, asserting that VanNatta will be cooperating with police and will waive her Miranda rights. VanNatta then says that she will talk, and the officers begin questioning her about what happened.

During this interview, Kent repeatedly interjects and answers multiple questions for VanNatta, often giving hypothetical examples of what might have occurred or how the towing job might have been done.

Klamm also took the stand on Tuesday. He is no longer in the towing business; he said he left because he could not maintain the long hours anymore.

At the time of the accident, Klamm said, he was in charge of training at Hillcrest, and he said that VanNatta had been through the company’s two-week training program. But an attorney for the plaintiff, Kerry Banahan Dagestad, said that only five days of training had been documented in VanNatta’s personnel file. Klamm responded that he didn’t know why that was the case, but that he personally watched several training videos with VanNatta that hadn’t been documented. Once VanNatta was on the job, he said, she quickly became one of his best employees.

As the Journal-World previously reported, part of the training VanNatta received was about keeping other people away from dangerous areas during a towing job, including the area around the vehicle being towed that’s known as the “kill zone.” VanNatta had testified that she was instructed to make sure everyone was out of the “kill zone” during a job, but that the job hadn’t actually started yet when the accident occurred.

The trial is expected to last through Friday in Douglas County District Court.