Judge Deutsch found the project manger guilty of a conscious indifference to his professional duties as the Hyatt project engineer who was primarily responsible for the preparation of design drawings and review of shop drawings for that project. He also concluded that the chief engineer's failure to closely monitor ...

The 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City was primarily the responsibility of the engineering firm Jack D. Gillum and Associates. While the original design was safe, the design was altered during construction from a single-rod system to a double-rod system, which doubled the load on the fourth-floor beams. The Missouri Board of Architects, Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors found the lead engineers, Jack Gillum and Daniel Duncan, guilty of gross negligence and misconduct because they approved the final structural drawings without performing basic safety calculations on the revised design. Both engineers lost their professional licenses in Missouri and several other states. While the hotel owner (Crown Center Redevelopment Corp.) and the contractor were involved in the litigation, the tragedy remains the definitive "textbook case" for engineering ethics and the legal liability of the Engineer of Record.