Jury holds Wal-Mart liable for selling deadly bullets

The family of a mistaken-identity murder victim has won nearly a million-dollar civil judgment against Wal-Mart for selling the fatal bullets to two underage killers.

A Circuit Court jury returned the verdict Friday in the Jan. 26, 1991, murder of Pensacola auto parts store clerk Billy Wayne Coker, shot as he filled in for the intended victim who had called in sick.

The jury ruled in favor of Coker's wife, Sandra, and her two children, finding Wal-Mart 35 percent to blame for illegally selling the ammunition to trigger man James Patrick Bonifay, who was 17 at the time, and accomplice Larry Edwin Fordham, then 18. The total judgment was for $996,275.

Federal law prohibits the sale of pistol ammunition to people under 21 and rifle ammunition to those under 18.

"This case will result in better training procedures for all large corporations selling firearms and ammunition through this country," said family attorney Martin Levin.

Levin said the case is the first of its kind in Florida and the only one he knows of in the nation dealing with ammunition.

Former Trout Auto Parts store employee Robin Archer, now 31, hired Bonifay, Fordham and another teen, Clifford E. Barth, to kill former co-worker Daniel Wells, whom Archer blamed for his firing.