MARION—Grief and greed are oftentimes overwhelming states of being. And when the two collide, the outcome can be, well…heavy.
Such was the case Wednesday with Roger Herrin.
We’d heard about the situation on Tuesday through some veiled references to “quarters,” but didn’t have any real idea of what would be going on in Marion at the Prince Law Firm at 118 Airway Drive, the law office of Mark Prince.
What was going on was a refund of what Prince’s firm was able to establish was an insurance ‘overpayment,’ regarding a wrongful death settlement in a car crash dating back to 2001, in which Doc Herrin, of Harrisburg, lost his son, Michael, who was only 15 at the time.
And how it was going down was in quarters. Tons of them. Delivered right to Mark Prince’s law office, as ordered. Well, the quarters weren’t ordered, but a sum of about $600,000 was. So Doc Herrin decided to pay a portion of that sum back, alright…with an order of $150,000 in quarters delivered straight to Prince’s back door from a federal reserve bank in St. Louis.
Photo from the UK Mail Online of Doc Herrin and the bags of quarters, being transferred to Prince’s office. Used here via Fair Use Act, photographer unknown.
Here’s how it originated: When Michael Herrin was killed while a passenger in a Jeep that was hit broadside by a truck at an intersection in the Raleigh area, the auto insurers paid out as per their coverage. However, the other two passengers in the vehicle, both of whom were injured but survived, argued that they should have received a portion of the money that Herrin received as payout. How that argument held, we have no idea…but they pursued it all the way up to the Appellate Court in Mt. Vernon, and just recently received the order that Roger Herrin needed to pay back some of the money he was issued over the death of his son, so that the other accident victims could be compensated from it.
So Herrin opted for the quarters as a form of protest. He had $150,000 of them delivered within clear plastic bags each containing $1,000, for a grand total of about four tons of partial “repayment” he was ordered to submit to Prince, the plaintffs’ attorney. Presumably Doc Herrin paid the rest of it by conventional means.
The man told media (which made it all the way across the pond, where the Brits found it just fascinating):
‘There was no satisfaction from doing that. The loss of a child is the loss of a child, and all the money doesn’t replace that,” he said.
The 76-year-old added: “I just wanted to draw attention to what went on here. I really wanted to do it in pennies.”
‘They can have all the money in the world and I’d take my son back,” Mr Herrin said. “It leaves a hole in your heart that is never repairable.”
We’ve not done the math on pennies. But we’d bet Doc Herrin has. Maybe that’s how he’ll send the rest of the repayment.
The one thing that stands out to us in coverage of the whole thing is Prince’s response. He whined that if he’d known Herrin was going to bring in the quarters, he’d have made arrangements to handle the coins instead of just having them sit around the law office, where it was a “security risk.”
What do you think about what Doc Herrin did? Was it over the top? Or did it make the impact he likely wanted it to make?