The wife of slain Salon Meritage owner Randy Lee Fannin is suing her business insurance company for delaying and withholding payments after last year's Seal Beach massacre that took the lives of her husband and seven others and nearly claimed the life of a ninth.
Sandi Fannin, co-owner of the beauty salon near Pacific Coast Highway, was in the back mixing hair dye the early afternoon of Oct. 12, 2011, when Orange County's worst-ever mass killing began.
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See also:
6 Women and 2 Men, 2011 OC Homicides Nos. 45-52: Massacred at Beauty Salon
Scott Evans Dekraai, Mass Murder Suspect, Indicted by Grand Jury
11 Ucked Fup OC Murder Incidents from 2011
But the lawsuit Fannin filed Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court alleges Employers Mutual Casualty Co., which protected Salon Meritage from
income and property losses, treated her “rudely, arrogantly
and as an adversary” and “with disdain instead of compassion.”
The carrier also informed Fannin 30 days was too soon after the tragedy to get Salon Meritage up and running–before eventually paying her $30,000, which is less than half of what the business lost being closed, reads the 11-page complaint filed with the assistance of her attorney, Howard S. Shernoff.
The business that Fannin sold to another hair stylist has yet to reopen, but there are plans to do so in a completely remodeled space within the next few months.
The trial of Huntington Beach 42-year-old Scott Evans Dekraai, who the
Orange County Grand Jury indicted on eight counts of murder and one count of
attempted murder for the massacre, is scheduled to begin in March. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas previously said he would seek the death penalty.
Dekraai and his ex-wife, a Salon Meritage stylist, had been fighting for years over the custody of their son and other divorce-related issues.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.