County man gets fraction of Roundup settlement
BUTLER TWP — Jeff Patton said his white blood cell count is down, but he doesn’t feel good about collecting less than $10,000 from a class action suit he joined against the maker of Roundup after contracting Leukemia from years of using the weed-killing product.
Patton, 73, said he started using Roundup in the mid-1990s at a farm, an auto repair shop where he did the landscaping and at other odd jobs.
After getting sick in 2019, he said he went to his primary care physician who told him that he had a high white blood cell count and he might have leukemia.
That doctor referred him to a cancer specialist who determined that he had leukemia since 1999 and the disease had altered his DNA, he said.
“I got real bad. I almost died from it,” Patton said.
Then, he saw a TV ad from the Dallas, Texas law firm Ferrer Poiriot Feller Daniel seeking clients for class action suit against the producer of Roundup, contacted the firm and joined the suit in 2020.
Monsanto, the now defunct company that developed Roundup, was purchased by Bayer in 2018.
Based on his conversations with the law firm, Patton said he figured that he would receive a $200,000 settlement and end up with $100,000 after the firm subtracted its fee.
The gross settlement he received in April was for $47,974 and his net disbursement was $9,600, or about 20% of the gross amount.
“I’m the guy with the cancer, and I wound up with the least amount of money,” Patton said.
Ferrer Poirot’s fee of $10,362, another law firm’s fee of $6,908 and a third firm’s fee of $1,918, which totaled $19,189, and $4,792 in case expenses were subtracted from the gross amount, according to a settlement ledger he received from Ferrer Poirot.
Medicare, which paid for his testing and treatment, claimed $14,392.
That left Patton with $9,600, or 20%, of the $47,974 gross settlement.
“What upsets me is I’m the guy with the cancer. I get 20% and I'm the one with the cancer,” Patton said. “Am I going to die next month from this crap?”
He said his doctor told him that the sweat he sometimes feels on cold weather days and the chills he gets on hot days are possible symptoms of leukemia. He said his next doctor’s appointment is next month.
Patton said the settlement he waited more than four years to receive seems unfair.
“I was surprised how little I ended up with and how Medicare ended up with more than I did.,” Patton said. “I think that’s discrimination against an old guy.”
