Musk and a Dead Horse: Two Cases Show Delaware Court’s Range

Brenton Marckese knows it was desperate, the way he tried to block trash trucks from entering a Delaware landfill that December morning. But somewhere inside were the remains of his beloved Clydesdale.

He had been riding the horse, named Michigan’s Breeze, 36 hours earlier when both were struck in a hit-and-run on a rural road. Marckese was hospitalized; Breeze euthanized and dumped in the state-run landfill without his knowledge.

No one would’ve allowed human remains to be treated that way, he reasoned. His 9-year-old mare deserved the same respect. “In my eyes, she was murdered,” he says.

Rebuffed at the landfill’s entrance, days before Christmas, Marckese turned to his last hope, the Delaware Chancery Court.

All he wanted was his horse back. He didn’t expect the case to grip Delaware’s tight-knit corporate law community. But it did, largely because of the judge asked to resolve it: Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick.

For nearly a year, McCormick and the Chancery Court had been besieged by criticism and online hostility after she scuttled Tesla Inc.’s attempt to reward CEO Elon Musk with a stock-based pay package worth at least $56 billion. Musk pulled his companies out of Delaware, urging other Fortune 500 leaders to do the same.

Amid the attacks from the world’s richest man, McCormick quietly turned her attention to the petition from Marckese, a 34-year-old construction worker from a small Delaware town. What happened next, observers say, highlights the Chancery Court’s responsibility—sometimes overlooked—to deliver equity for all who seek it.

For lawyers like Richard Renck, a Duane Morris LLP partner in Wilmington, Marckese’s case reinforces the notion the court serves “not just our corporate citizens, but our individual citizens that have beefs with their neighbors—or [who] need to find the remains of their horse.”

‘Extraordinary Power’

Every state operates civil courts to resolve local disputes, but Delaware splits civil litigation in two: one track for lawsuits seeking monetary damages, another for equity matters where money alone wouldn’t resolve the issue. That second group goes to Chancery Court.

Its 230 years of case law, along with judges recognized as business law experts, help make Delaware an attractive corporate home. Over 2 million businesses, including nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500, are incorporated in the state. To compete, states such as Nevada and Texas have established specialized business courts, along with statutes offering corporate leaders a bigger say in organizing their companies and more protection from investor lawsuits.

The billionaire litigants get all the attention, but the Chancery Court is also Delaware’s venue for guardianships, estates and wills, easement disputes, and other property concerns.

Its non-corporate docket has grown alongside the ever-increasing number of corporate lawsuits—so much that its bench now includes five magistrates to help the seven main judges manage the caseload. The state judiciary wants legislators to add two more magistrates next year.

The traditional equity docket is an important training ground for corporate law.

“It’s this extraordinary power that the Court of Chancery has—not to award damages, but to instruct people to do, or refrain from doing, something,” said retired Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III, a onetime magistrate. “There has to be a balance, and that’s the beauty of equity.”

McCormick, 45, joined the bench in 2018, and became its first female chancellor, or chief judge, in 2021. Her resume includes degrees from Harvard and Notre Dame, but her roots are in Delaware.

She grew up roughly 10 miles from the spot where Breeze died, a rural area outside Dover where Amish horse-drawn buggies are a familiar sight.

“I had a horse briefly,” McCormick told Marckese’s attorney in one hearing, according to a transcript. “I understand how precious this animal was to him.”

The Crash

Marckese had once worked transporting racehorses, and he owned a thoroughbred for a while. But he’d wanted a Clydesdale ever since seeing Budweiser’s famous team when he was a boy. He leapt at the chance when a friend showed him a photo of a foal in 2015 and said Marckese could buy her for $1,100. “Melted my heart,” he says.

Michigan’s Breeze was the name she came with, but Marckese called her Breeze. As she grew to 2,000 pounds, he lived paycheck to paycheck to keep her fed and healthy. She became a kind of emotional support animal for him and his friends, some of them military veterans, as they struggled with substance abuse, the deaths of loved ones, and tumultuous relationships.

“That horse has helped multiple friends of mine from committing suicide. That horse has kept multiple friends of mine from going back down trails of drugs,” he says. “That horse has kept me from going out to the bars and drinking heavily, because that’s what I used to do.”

Over time, they developed a routine: Every day after work, he saddled up Breeze to ride about 100 yards down the road, then back to the barn whose owner boarded her in exchange for Marckese’s help clearing pastures and other work around the grounds.

They were almost home on Dec. 17 when Marckese heard a vehicle approaching fast behind him, according to the account he’s since repeated in interviews and court testimony. Marckese guided Breeze to the road’s edge, her front legs dipping into a ditch. As her hind legs followed off the blacktop, the vehicle struck them. All Marckese remembers are its bright, square headlights.

The driver briefly stopped, then drove off into the dusk. Marckese, his face numb and bleeding, tried to calm her as she convulsed on the ground, cradling the horse’s head as he had when he bottle-fed her when she was just a few months old.

By this time, the barn’s owner had arrived, paramedics had been called. A veterinarian and the farrier who cared for the horse’s hooves were on the way.

Marckese reluctantly left in an ambulance. He didn’t think he’d have to remind anyone how precious Breeze was to him.

He received painkillers at the hospital and lost track of his phone, and couldn’t get a clear answer about what had happened to Breeze. Badly bruised but with no broken bones, he was discharged early the next morning. It was late afternoon before he retrieved his phone from his mother and saw the messages from the barn’s owner.

She told him Breeze had been put down and gave him the number for the company that took her away. He eventually learned the horse had been taken to the Sandtown Landfill, about a dozen miles away, along the Maryland state line. Large animal carcasses weren’t uncommon there—Breeze was one of four horses dumped that day, according to court records.

Marckese left home early the next morning to be at the landfill when it opened.

After his showdown failed, he pleaded on a local talk radio program for tips that might lead police to the hit-and-run driver. Delaware’s equestrian community, meanwhile, spread his story on social media. There, it caught the attention of an attorney who happened to take riding lessons at the same barn.

Christmas Eve Hearing

Angelica Mamani had been drawn to the law in part by horses: Working at a ranch, developing a love for English riding, she noticed that the horses with the nicest saddles, bridles, and other gear all belonged to lawyers and judges.

A first-year attorney at Hudson Jones Jaywork & Fisher, she offered to help Marckese for free. She’d assisted on a few Chancery Court property disputes and contract breach claims, but nothing like this—seeking a court order to let Marckese retrieve his horse’s remains.

Mamani quickly drafted and filed the petition, but assumed no one at the court would see it until after the holiday. Then her phone rang Christmas Eve afternoon.

As the chief judge, McCormick could choose which cases to hear. She also was the only judge with the authority to open the court during the holiday break.

She called for an emergency hearing over Zoom that night.

“I don’t want to ruin everyone’s Christmas, but I don’t know what else to do, because it seems like this is kind of urgent,” the judge said during the proceeding, according to a transcript.

For a court that’s drawn a national and often critical spotlight for its novel rulings curtailing corporate and shareholder power, these were uncharted waters: A dead horse in a landfill presented legal questions McCormick never had to consider.

“Hardship and the balancing of the equities is not necessarily what’s front and center,” the judge said in the Zoom call that night with Marckese, Mamani, and an attorney representing the state-run landfill, according to the transcript.

“What we need to know is the law on this area. Has this ever happened? Has a person’s belongings ever been wrongly placed in a landfill? And if so, how do we balance public safety and the need to prevent the hazard that comes along with digging in a capped landfill with the rights of the person whose property has been taken?”

The lawyer for the Delaware Solid Waste Authority agreed in that Dec. 24 call that the landfill would stop adding dirt or debris to the acre-wide area where Breeze had been dumped until McCormick could consider additional arguments.

But the attorney, Michael Teichman of Parkowski, Guerke & Swayze, said the agency didn’t want to set a precedent for others to dig into the state’s landfills.

“A landfill isn’t just a hole in the ground where you throw trash,” he said. Disturbing its layers risked releasing toxic gases and damaging the infrastructure holding it together.

The only time anyone could remember such a search permitted in a state landfill was in 1996, when the FBI was searching for Anne Marie Fahey, a gubernatorial aide whose disappearance and murder by a prominent Wilmington lawyer ranks among the state’s most notorious crimes.

In briefs and a second Zoom hearing, on Dec. 27, Mamani argued Marckese hadn’t abandoned his horse when he was carted away in the ambulance. He hadn’t consented to her removal to the landfill, either. The state had no lawful reason to withhold Breeze’s remains from Marckese.

“There’s no justification for it,” Mamani argued.

For Marckese, the hearing was better than his past courtroom experiences. This judge spoke with him—not at him—and promised a ruling just after New Year’s.

In the ensuing days, the barn’s owner told him that a homeowner’s doorbell camera near the crash site had captured the incident. The device picked up the noise of the crash, but no images. Marckese couldn’t bring himself to listen to it.

He kept replaying that night in his head. He had told the barn’s owner, in a conversation months earlier, he would never want Breeze’s remains taken to a landfill. “I said straight to her: My animals get cremated. I don’t care what it costs,” he testified to the judge.

McCormick still had Tesla hanging over her as 2025 began. She had struck down Musk’s pay for a second time at the beginning of December, but owed the company a decision about a proposed settlement with shareholders that called for Tesla’s board, including Musk, to return stock and options worth up to $735 million and forgo three years of pay allegedly worth $184 million.

Before she finalized that decision, though, she turned to Marckese.

Her 15-page opinion, released Jan. 3, fit within her usual writing style: detailed reasoning sprinkled with relatable analogies rooted in real-world expressions. It described Marckese’s lawsuit as “a tribute to the life” of his horse, and noted he “would dig up that entire acre himself, given access and a shovel.”

But, she added, “landfills are delicate things.”

McCormick explained the difficulty he had brought to her court.

“Balancing the equities requires a court to compare the relative importance of interests that defy conventional approaches to valuation,” she wrote. “How does one compare the solace of knowing that the remains of one’s beloved animal companion have been treated with dignity against the dangers of disturbing a meticulously engineered landfill? Forget comparing apples to oranges, it’s more like comparing apples to differential calculus.”

In the end, she denied his petition to open the landfill, though noting “his love for Breeze is undeniable, and his desire to treat her remains with respect is most praiseworthy.”

Asked by Bloomberg Law for comment, McCormick replied in an email that she prefers to let her opinions speak for themselves, and she works to give each litigant her “full attention and make sure people feel heard.”

“I also strongly believe that the traditional equitable matters are the soul of our court,” she said.

Unique Ruling

Lawyers and lawmakers always keep a close eye on new Chancery Court rulings because so many of them, like those in the Musk case, have the potential to stir up Delaware’s corporate interests. So they couldn’t help but notice McCormick’s ruling in Marckese’s case.

Just her swift response to Marckese’s petition showed the court is working as intended, state Sen. Dave Lawson (R) said Feb. 20 during a hearing considering the Delaware judiciary’s budget requests.

“McCormick jumped on it,” he said. Marckese didn’t get the result he wanted, “but he got the court to act immediately, and I don’t think any other state can brag on that turnaround.”

Glasscock, McCormick’s retired colleague, added the opinion to the reading list for the corporate law survey course he teaches at Georgetown, calling it “a tutorial on how equity should work.”

Breeze’s case “is a great example of a case that had to be tried quickly,” he said. “It could not languish while some corporate matter was being heard.”

It’s also a decision unique to Delaware, said Widener University Delaware Law School Professor Geeta Kohli Tewari. None of the states attempting to compete with Delaware’s corporate dominance appears to want to consider non-corporate matters alongside corporate litigation.

But if a business court doesn’t hear local cases like the story of how Breeze ended up in a landfill, she asked, how mindful will it be when it has to evaluate executives failing to enact appropriate oversight to prevent, for example, sexual harassment of their employees?

“They would really struggle with rendering decisions that reflect the human aspect” of the corporate harms presented to them, Kohli Tewari said. That should matter to corporate leaders if they care about their workforce and their business reputation, she said.

Marckese and Mamani don’t plan to appeal McCormick’s ruling. He’s also not planning to seek damages in another court. It was never about the money.

“The point was to get the horse out, but now it’s 40 feet underground,” he says.

He only met McCormick through hastily scheduled videoconferencing but was struck by the judge’s handling of the case. “I still could feel compassion from her,” he says.

For now, Marckese has to mourn the loss of Breeze and hope for another form of justice. There have been no arrests in the hit-and-run.

Delaware State Police say the investigation remains open.