Disgruntled employee deletes 7-years worth of architectual drawings

Published 28 January 2008

An employee in a Florida architectural firm believed she was about to be fired; she came to the office on Sunday and deleted 7-years worth of drawings and blueprints, valued by the firm at $2.5 million

Here is a cautionary tale. As businesses worry about natural disasters and act of terrorism, they should also be mindful, and prepared for, spiteful, angry, and vengeful employees. Marie Cooley of Jacksonville, Florida, came across a job announcement in the classified section of a local paper — a job which looked like hers. She admits she was certain she was about to be fired. So police say that late Sunday night she crept into the Mandarin office where she worked at Steven E. Hutchins Architects. “She decided to go and mess up everything for everybody,” said Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson. Jefferson says Cooley accessed the company’s server with her own account, and with a handful of mouse clicks and keystrokes she deleted seven years’ worth of architectural drawings. Seven years of work were gone in but a few seconds. The company put the value of the deleted files at $2.5 million. “She decided to be spiteful and go in and sabotage the records. And she did a very good job of that,” Jefferson said. According to police, Cooley confessed to the crime. It is a second degree felony that could lead to a five-year prison sentence.

There is a silver lining here: The owner of the firm said he has paid good money but managed to recover those files and that the firm has now managed to get every deleted drawing back from its digital death. “The lesson to be learned here is that you can’t depend on having just one set of records or files and having your employees have access to them. You’ve got to have some kind of backup,” Jefferson said.

The irony: The owner of the architecture firm says Marie Cooley was not going to be fired. He says the job listing was for his wife’s business — not his.