HOUSTON — It is hard to escape the long arm of Wal-Mart. Just ask Bruce O. Gabbard, a former computer security technician who was fired by the corporation in March 2007 for spying on company officials.
Mr. Gabbard has been on the run ever since, pursued by Wal-Mart’s lawyers, who claim he took a trove of company documents with him when he left. A corporate fugitive, he fled Wal-Mart’s home state of Arkansas and has not returned because a state judge has ordered he be arrested on sight and questioned under oath about whether he pilfered documents.
Now Wal-Mart has filed suit in Oklahoma — where Mr. Gabbard has moved — seeking to enforce the Arkansas judge’s order. Mr. Gabbard’s lawyers say the motion amounts to an attempt to have their client arrested and brought back to Arkansas, which would be highly unusual in a civil dispute.
Wal-Mart officials deny they want Mr. Gabbard physically detained — the order to arrest him has no legal weight outside Arkansas, they admit — but they are asking the Oklahoma court to require him to return internal corporate documents they say he has. They also say Mr. Gabbard posted Wal-Mart documents on a Web site he controls as recently as last week.
“We have credible evidence that Mr. Gabbard copied Wal-Mart files before returning them to the company, and he revealed this month that he still retains Wal-Mart’s confidential information,” said Greg Rossiter, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “All we are asking is that Mr. Gabbard comply with the court’s order requiring that he turn over confidential files.”
Mr. Gabbard maintains he did comply with the court order in April 2007, handing over all the documents he had at the time, including those on his desktop computer, several hard drives and a raft of other digital storage devices.
“I brought everything and surrendered it to Wal-Mart,” he said in an interview this week.
But Mr. Gabbard’s lawyers say he later came into possession of another batch of internal Wal-Mart documents, after he had been fired and after a court order in 2008 prohibiting him from revealing trade secrets. They argue those documents, which support his claim that he was wrongly terminated, are not covered by the court’s order.
Wal-Mart officials say those are questions for Judge John R. Scott in Bentonville, Ark., to decide. For two years, they complain, Mr. Gabbard has flouted the judge’s order to appear in court and to hand over company documents in his possession.
David Massey, a lawyer representing Mr. Gabbard pro bono, says his client believes he cannot get a fair hearing in Bentonville, home to Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters. Mr. Massey says the Arkansas court denied his client due process when it held Mr. Gabbard in contempt two years ago.
Mr. Gabbard was unemployed and living in South Carolina when he received notice of the hearing, just three days before it was to take place, Mr. Massey said. The judge held the hearing without him, decided in Wal-Mart’s favor, then ordered the local sheriff to arrest Mr. Gabbard on sight for contempt of court. The ruling also ordered Mr. Gabbard to disclose all the documents he had, along with the names of everyone he had communicated with since January 2007.
“He’s scared to death to go back to Wal-Mart’s home court,” Mr. Massey said.
Mr. Gabbard, a 48-year-old former Marine, was fired after Wal-Mart discovered he had taped telephone conversations between a New York Times reporter and members of the company’s public relations staff. Mr. Gabbard, a computer security expert, has maintained he was a fall guy. His superiors knew he was monitoring phone calls, he says, and had encouraged him to find the leak to the newspaper. Wal-Mart says he acted alone.
After his dismissal, Mr. Gabbard embarrassed the retailer, telling The Wall Street Journal he was part of an elaborate operation that snooped on employees, stockholders and company critics. Wal-Mart also accused him of leaking trade secrets to the news media, including a plan to increase the retailer’s stock price called “Project Red.”
Immigration is a boon to American science and math, a new report asserts, noting that 70 percent of the finalists in a recent prestigious science competition are the children of immigrants.
The report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va., states that many immigrant parents emphasize hard science and math education for their children, viewing those fields as paths to success.
Statistics supporting that belief: According to a recent Georgetown University study on the value of undergraduate majors, the lifetime median annual income for someone with a bachelor's degree in engineering is $75,000, compared with $29,000 for a counseling or psychology major. [Infographic: Highest-paying College Majors]
Only 12 percent of Americans are foreign-born, the NFAP report says. Even so, children of immigrants took 70 percent of the finalist slots in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search Competition, an original-research competition for high school seniors.
Of the 40 finalists, 28 had parents born in other countries: 16 from China, 10 from India, one from South Korea and one from Iran.
"In proportion to their presence in the U.S. population, one would expect only one child of an Indian (or Chinese) immigrant parent every two and a half years to be an Intel Science Search finalist, not 10 in a year," wrote the report's author, NFAP director Stuart Anderson.
Finalists interviewed for the report attributed their interest in research to their parents' attitudes.
"Our parents brought us up with love of science ..
as a value," David Kenneth Tang-Quan, whose parents emigrated from China to California, told Anderson, according to the report.
Still, children of immigrants face barriers outside of the education system. According to the Georgetown report, racial disparities in pay persist even within science fields. Whites with an undergraduate major in engineering out-earn Asians with the same degree by about $8,000 a year. African-American and Hispanic engineering graduates fare worse, making about $60,000 and $56,000 per year, respectively, compared with whites' $80,000.
Asians out-earn whites in the fields of health, law and public policy; psychology and social work; and biology and life sciences.
The fact that children of immigrants excel in science and math should be taken into account when making immigration policy, Anderson wrote: "The results should serve as a warning against new restrictions on legal immigration, both family and employment-based immigration, since such restrictions are likely to prevent many of the next generation of outstanding scientists and researcher from emerging in America."
You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.
This undated handout photo provided by the Barnhard family shows Ben Barnhard. Barnhard finally had reason to be optimistic this summer: The 13-year-old shed more than 100 pounds at a rigorous weight-loss academy after enduring years of classmates taunts about his obesity, left to seek solace in the quiet of his bedroom with his pet black cat and the intricate origami designs he created. Barnhard Family / AP Photo
By ERIC TUCKER Associated Press Posted on Monday, 08.08.11
WASHINGTON -- Ben Barnhard finally had reason to be optimistic this summer: The 13-year-old shed more than 100 pounds at a rigorous weight-loss academy, a proud achievement for a boy who had endured classmates' taunts about his obesity and who had sought solace in the quiet of his bedroom, with his pet black cat and the intricate origami designs he created.
But one month before school was to start for the special-needs teen, his mother, psychiatrist Margaret Jensvold, shot him in the head, then killed herself. Officers found their bodies Tuesday in the bedrooms of their home in Kensington, Md., an upper-middle class Washington suburb. They also found a note.
"School - can't deal with school system," the letter began, Jensvold's sister, Susan Slaughter, told The Associated Press.
And later: "Debt is bleeding me. Strangled by debt."
Although family members said they were stunned by the killings, they also said Jensvold had become increasingly strained by financial pressure and by anguished fights with the county public school system over the special-needs education of her son, who had an autism spectrum disorder. They said the school district - apparently believing it could adequately educate Ben - had refused to cover tuition costs for the boy to attend a private school for special-needs students. Jensvold didn't have the money herself and didn't want to return her son to public school, where relatives said she felt harshly judged and marginalized and where Ben had struggled.
"It was a huge stress," Slaughter said. "It's very hard being a single parent under any circumstances, but to have a high-needs child is overwhelming. And then to have him inappropriately placed in the school, and have the school fighting with her, was really traumatic."
Jensvold also offered an explanation for taking her son's life.
"She did mention in the note that she knows people whose parents committed suicide when they were children and how difficult and traumatizing that was, and she didn't want to do that to Ben," Slaughter said.
"It is very true," she added. "I can't imagine Ben ever recovering from the loss of his mother."
Special needs education is an emotionally freighted issue, perhaps especially so in Montgomery County - an affluent region where parents tend to be actively engaged in education and where schools are highly regarded nationwide.
School district spokeswoman Lesli Maxwell said that privacy laws prevented her from discussing the particulars of Barnhard's case, but that the district offered vast options for its 17,000 special-education students and will refer students for private schooling when it can't meet their needs.
Jensvold, a Johns Hopkins-educated psychiatrist specializing in women's health, was passionate and determined. She made news in 1990 by filing a gender discrimination lawsuit against the National Institute of Mental Health, where she was a medical staff fellow. A judge ultimately ruled against her, calling her version of events an "illusion." She later had her own private practice but most recently was working at Kaiser Permanente.
She also was a protective mother, constantly fighting with Montgomery County schools over how best to accommodate her son. He was her world, said her divorce lawyer, Robert Baum.
"She came with an album of pictures of her in a very warm and endearing type of situation," he said. "Her arms around him playing outside, amusement parks, all the types of things you'd love to see of parents dealing with their kids."
Ben was an active infant - his family nicknamed him "ATB," or All-Terrain Baby - but became increasingly withdrawn and isolated, and relatives said as a child he developed an autoimmune disease that's sometimes triggered by strep. A divorce court filing lists 18 specialists involved in Ben's care, and Jensvold's own suicide note hints at some of the child's difficulties: "writing problems, migraines, hearing things" - and "a bit paranoid."
"Ben's needs - unable to meet Ben's needs," Jensvold wrote in her note, according to Slaughter.
He had a small group of friends and enjoyed origami, animals and picking tomatoes with his grandmother, his father said. But school was difficult for him, and his weight - topping 275 before his weight loss-program - made him a target for teasing. He found comfort with even more food.
"He used to say, 'Mom and Dad, I don't want to go to school. I don't want to deal with those people. They're mean to me and they hurt me,'" recalled Jamie Barnhard, Ben's father and Jensvold's ex-husband. "It broke both of our hearts."
The couple placed their son in the county's special education program, but Barnhard said his son struggled in the system. He spent about nine months at Wellspring Academies, a weight-loss boarding school in North Carolina, returning in the spring more than 100 pounds slimmer and more confident.
"He wanted to ride his bike. He wanted to be a kid again," Barnhard said. "He wanted to go out and have fun. He wanted to fly airplanes with his dad. He wanted to just do anything."
But there were still concerns about where to send Ben to school.
Jensvold appeared consumed by his education at her father's memorial service last spring, Slaughter said. She confided that she was having trouble paying the roughly $50,000 tuition for Ben to attend Wellspring. She presented a binder about five-inches thick detailing his academic needs, along with a chart showing how his IQ scores had fallen over the years.
At the end of June, Slaughter wrote her sister to say their mother would pay for Ben's education for the coming year. Jensvold had planned to enroll her son in the Ivymount School, a Rockville, Md., private school specializing in autism and other learning disabilities. Tuition there ranges based on a child's needs, but can be more than $60,000, the school said Monday. Her mother said she'd send a check.
In her final months, Jensvold only sporadically communicated with her family, as she had for years, Slaughter said. Emails to Jensvold frequently went unreturned, mail sometimes unopened.
Ben spent July 4 with his divorced parents aboard his dad's restored boat, treading past the Washington Monument with a picnic dinner of barbecue and fresh pineapple. It was a final moment of serenity.
He died a month later. One day after his body was found - co-workers hadn't heard from Jensvold for days and newspapers had accumulated outside the house - a $10,000 check from Jensvold's mother arrived, Slaughter said.
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