Pristina owner commits suicide

The California owner of a Spokane Valley wood products company committed suicide not far from his Northern California residence less than a week after shutting down his business.

The San Mateo County coroner’s office said J.D. (Jeff Dean) Wells, 50, jumped to his death off a busy highway bridge Feb. 11. Wells was sole owner of Pristina Pine LLC, a Spokane Valley company he started in 2002.

On Feb. 7, Wells announced his company would shut down operations at the end of February. He was in the Bay Area as the news was shared with about 100 workers who remained at the company.

Company officers and people associated with Wells said they assume he was distraught over the business’s closure.

A resident of Cupertino, Wells in 2002 took over Spokane-based Dellen Wood Products and changed the name to Pristina Pine. He later bought the production building and property at 3014 N. Flora.

During the housing boom, Pristina Pine grew to more than 200 assembly workers cutting wood pieces that were shipped to companies assembling custom-made commercial and residential windows.

The shutdown came after Pristina saw a major downturn in orders because ot the housing market decline. Up to that point, Pristina Pine was profitable, said Eugene Winter, who joined the company in September 2007 as chief operating officer.

The death of Wells came as a surprise to Winter and others involved in the company. While the company was shutting down, Wells gave no sign of being distressed or despondent, Winter said.

Workers and others who did business with Pristina say his death is just as unlikely and distressing as the late 2007 suicide of Jerry Ferry, 54, who worked as production manager at Pristina until Oct. 7, 2007.

Ferry killed himself at his Liberty Lake home Oct. 31, said Robert Dunn, a Spokane attorney who represented him in a lawsuit against his former employer, filed two weeks before Ferry’s death.

Philip Brooke, a Spokane attorney who represented Wells and Pristina, said he was astonished that both men killed themselves. Brooke, who knew Wells for seven years, said Wells was “a smart guy, an entrepreneur who really wanted to do well.”

Ferry’s suit against Pristina alleged he was owed roughly 12 percent of the company’s net profits per year over the past five years, based on a verbal agreement with Wells. Attorneys for Wells denied he had agreed to that share.

In a countersuit in Spokane County Superior Court, Brooke sued Ferry on behalf of Pristina, saying Ferry illegally removed some of the firm’s equipment from factory. Ferry, as court documents show, had told others he intended to start a competing business in Spokane.

Dunn said Ferry’s suicide was a shock. “He was totally committed to the suit. In all my meetings with him, he never showed any indication he wasn’t in it for the duration,” Dunn said

Winter took over day-to-day operations in mid-2007 about a month before Ferry was let go.

Winter’s hiring was the result of AmericanWest Bank, Pristina’s main creditor, deciding an outside management team was needed to save the company. AmericanWest Bank had loaned Pristina more than $10 million by that point.

When Winter was put in charge, Wells was in full agreement with that choice and felt it was “the best way” to either return to profitability or to sell the company to someone else, said Blair Reynolds, executive vice president and general counsel for AmericanWest.

Up through the third quarter of last year Pristina Pine was still making a profit and paying off debt, Reynolds said. But sales were slumping at that point and no signs of recovery were on the horizon, Reynolds said.

In January, Andersen Corp., based in Minnesota, told Wells it would no longer buy wood products from Pristina. Andersen accounted for more than 80 percent of yearly sales, according to Reynolds. Winter and the bank conferred with Wells and concluded the business would need to shut down.

Around the same time AmericanWest accountants wrote off $3.8 million in debt from Pristina, realizing it would not likely collect that money, said Pat Rusnak, the bank’s chief operating officer.

That decision left Pristina LLC and Wells’ estate with $3.8 million in remaining debt, not including debt owed by Wells to other lenders for other business ventures, Rusnak said.

Reynolds said one such venture was Wells’ failed investment in 2006 to build a sawmill in Western Montana. Wells borrowed or spent between $3 million and $5 million on the project, which involved refurbishing a mill near Trout Creek. The sawmill never was completed as costs grew beyond estimates, Reynolds said.

In the view of Reynolds and Rusnak, the failed sawmill venture was a contributing factor in Wells’ decision to close down Pristina.

“When you take that cash out of the business and it’s no longer available to sustain operations when things slow down, that affects the company,” Rusnak said.

The bank expects to recover its debt from Pristina through the sale of remaining products, selling off cutting and gluing equipment and auctioning off a few small real estate parcels owned by Wells near the Pristina property.

Reynolds and Rusnak said they had no clue Wells was despondent. Brooke said he could only speculate that the business failure sent Wells reeling.

“With Andersen announcing it would no longer purchase products, that signaled the end of Pristina,” Brooke said.

“So when the employees were let go, that weighed heavily on J.D.’s mind. I guess it was too much for him.”