Writer closes book on lawsuit

A Spokane writer has dropped a lawsuit against Best Buy Co. Inc. after locating backup copies of writing projects he thought were lost when his laptop crashed.

Laertes Muldrow filed the suit in July against the company, saying he was told by service technicians they would save the hard drive on which he had 1,500 pages of fiction he had written, plus copies of his first two published novels.

Muldrow said he bought the laptop from Best Buy and then decided to take it in for service when the hard drive failed last year.

Muldrow, 53, said Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” service group told him his best chance for recovery was sending the laptop to a California contractor who did that type of work.

The hard drive was inadvertently thrown away by that California firm’s technicians, the suit said.

Muldrow sought $75,000 in damages for lost work and money he’d spent on having editors work on his manuscripts, according to the lawsuit.

Best Buy representatives denied the claim, saying he signed a release when giving them the Sony laptop for repair. The release waived Best Buy of liability for any lost data.

Several weeks ago Muldrow learned that his ex-wife, who had been living in China, still had electronic copies of the works he had sent her.

His ex-wife contacted Muldrow and sent him the backups.

“So all I really lost were the covers for the books and all the graphics for the novels,” he said.

Two books Muldrow has self-published so far are a young-adult novel, “Evolve,” and a fantasy novel, “Manawydan.” His next book will be published in several months, he added.

“It wasn’t worth it anymore for me to pursue the suit,” said Muldrow.

In the end he had to buy a new laptop and to pay attorneys’ fees.