Karen Powers lived and breathed State Farm, even as she waged a decades-long battle with cancer. “She did love State Farm,” said Cody Powers, her son. Cody Powers said that his mother wore State Farm sweatshirts and T-shirts and entered every promotion the company offered. The family st ill had two pedal cars that Karen Powers won in a contest, and she purchased many of the diecast model cars that have long been core to the State Farm brand. “To me, she was State Farm,” Cody Powers said. “Everything they said they stood for, that was her.” When a storm destroyed the roof of Karen Powers’ Yukon home, her love for State Farm was not enough to prevent the insurance giant from denying the claim. It was one of hundreds of denied roof claims in Oklahoma that have come to light since early December, when Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced an intervention in a claim that has come to represent all of them. In most of the cases, State Farm denied policyholders who had no connection to the company beyond paying their premiums. In the case of Karen Powers, Oklahoma’s largest writer of homeowners insurance targeted one of their own. Nevertheless, laid low by cancer and the claim battle, Karen Powers continued on in the job that had provided her with a lifelong sense of meaning and purpose. She worked on the morning of the day of her final hospital admittance. She died in hospice, a month later. “She’ll Never Sell State Farm Again” Shaun Powers, Karen Powers’ husband of 34 years, wasn’t 100% sure when his wife began working in a State Farm office because it was before the two met at church. Perhaps as early as 1985. Over the course of her career, Karen Powers worked in the offices of three State Farm agents as a kind of office manager with, eventually, duties of selling insurance herself. Shaun Powers clarified that State Farm agents are technically not State Farm employees and neither are those who work for State Farm agents. It’s more like being a freelancer. That said, he agreed with his son that Karen Powers had gone all in on the corporate messaging. “State Farm was her life,” Shaun Powers said. “She felt that it was the best company out there that sold insurance.” For all intents and purposes, Shaun Powers said, his wife was an agent. State Farm pursued her for years to make it official, he said, and the only substantive difference between his wife and the agents she worked for was the name on the door. Selling homeowners insurance was practically part of the family business. Shaun Powers ran a construction company, and Karen Powers’ brother was a roofer. Once, when the Powers’ home suffered hail damage and State Farm offered a partial payout, Shaun Powers and his brother-in-law did the repair themselves. All the while, there was the cancer. Karen Powers was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, when Cody Powers was two years old, Shaun Powers said. Even then, the prognosis was not good: she hoped to live long enough to move into the Yukon home they had set their sights on purchasing and she wanted to see her son into kindergarten. Karen Powers (Courtesy Photo/Powers Family) She got a lot more than that. “She fought cancer for 28 years,” Shaun Powers said. “She fought so damn hard, and she saw Cody graduate from high school.” The battle to give Karen Powers as much life as possible had left the years a blur, Shaun Powers said. He believed that it was in 2018 that the cancer got worse. Breast cancer metastasized into Karen Powers’ bones, and then it moved into lymphoma. At that point, Shaun Powers said, the care was palliative: all they could do was maintain her quality of her life until she passed. In 2020 and 2021, storms hit the Powers’ Yukon home. After the second storm, a story played out that was eerily similar to other stories Oklahoma Watch has investigated: the Powers’ claim was denied as their neighbors got new roofs without a hitch. Truth be told, it was worse than a denied claim. An out-of-state adjuster arrived to assess their claim, Shaun Powers said. Karen Powers stood on the porch as her brother and the adjuster engaged in a heated debate on the roof above her. They fought over whether the storm damage was new or old. She could hear all of it, Shaun Powers said. Karen Powers overheard the adjuster accusing her husband and brother of having failed to perform work with the money that State Farm had issued on the earlier claim. Karen Power’s brother told the adjuster that he would take the claim to a public adjusting firm to seek a fair outcome. Karen Powers shuddered at what the adjuster said next, Shaun Powers said. “If you go to a public adjuster, I’ll make sure that she gets fired,” the adjuster said. “She’ll never sell State Farm again.” “That absolutely killed her,” Shaun Powers recalled. “She couldn’t believe they would do her like that. But there were also bigger fish to fry in terms of staying alive as long as she could.” It fell on Shaun Powers to take their case to the Edmond-based firm Coppermark Public Adjusters. I’m Not Afraid of Them Years before Greg Cannon ran a construction company and founded Coppermark, he served in the Middle East aboard the Navy’s last diesel-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy. The experience informed his attitude toward the Oklahoma Insurance Department, with which Coppermark has had a long and litigious relationship. “I’ve been to war, I’m not afraid of them,” Cannon said. “They’ve been coming after us for six years. What are they going to do? Yank our license because we were trying to help people when they weren’t? That’s a great story.” Around 2015, when he was still running his construction business, Cannon began to notice a shift in strategy from insurance companies: what they were doing on claims wasn’t matching up with the policies they sold to their customers. The fights over those discrepancies revealed Cannon’s true calling: public adjusting. “I liked being able to help people who didn’t know they were being taken advantage of,” Cannon said. Cannon established Coppermark and almost immediately reached out to Stephanie Lee, a roofing contractor and independent adjuster with extensive experience in hail, wind, and tornado damage. Lee had a perfect resume, Cannon said, and she was ideal as a partner in the public adjusting firm he was envisioning. Cannon and Lee formed a partnership at the start of 2019. Coppermark now has a staff of eight and handles as many as 200 claims per year in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Missouri and beyond. The problems with the insurance department started almost immediately. A conflict with AAA over a 2017 roof claim resulted in the insurance department accusing Lee of representing a contractor as an adjuster. Coppermark filed suit to argue that Lee had been acting as an appraiser instead and was denied due process as she sought a hearing to address what felt like an insurance company–driven effort to stymie Coppermark’s relationship with its client, Cannon said. Long before news broke of lawsuits alleging a widespread State Farm bad faith scheme to wrongly deny Oklahoma hail claims, Coppermark’s petition accused insurance companies and the insurance department of working in cahoots. “The Oklahoma Insurance Department and insurance carriers are acting as co-conspirators in denying the public legal rights, stalling claims, and preventing policyholders from getting even basic repairs done to their property,” the March 2019 petition read. Coppermark spent $30,000 to take the fight all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where a dismissal amounted to a stalemate, Cannon said. 300 Complaints It was around that same time that Cannon and Lee noticed an uptick in denied roof claims, they said. It wasn’t just State Farm, it was everyone — but State Farm had most of the market share. What they were seeing was insurers delaying claims as long as possible, ignoring laws that established deadlines for claim filings, inspections and decisions. Those laws were supposed to be enforced by the insurance department. Cannon recalled attending a meeting a few years earlier with insurance commissioner John Doak. Doak emphasized, Cannon said, that the insurance department became aware of bad practices only if they received complaints. As Doak described it, the department did not receive many complaints. An attorney, Cannon said, suggested that Coppermark consider filing complaints about delayed roof claims in an attempt to head off unnecessary litigation. Perhaps the insurance department would take action. “We were trying to prevent lawsuits,” Cannon said. From late 2018 to the end of 2020, Coppermark filed approximately 300 complaints. It Felt Like a Threat One day in January 2021, Cannon said, as the full Coppermark team sat around a conference table, a call came in from the insurance department. Cannon put it on speakerphone. The call was recorded. The caller identified himself as Mike Rhoades with the insurance department, but did not otherwise indicate his position within the department. Today, Mike Rhoades is Commissioner Glen Mulready’s personal designee to the Oklahoma Employees Insurance and Benefits Board of the department’s group insurance division. In a measured but hostile tone, Rhoades called attention to a great number of complaints that had come from Coppermark. Rhoades said that the complaints were being referred to the legal department for possible action. That was strange, Cannon said. What he meant was that the complaints were not being sent to the department’s market conduct team, which would have been the appropriate group to evaluate complaints. “It felt like a threat,” Cannon said. Lee recalled that she immediately had suspicions about the true nature of the call. “I thought, ‘Who at State Farm asked them to make this call?’” Lee said. The tense conversation continued for several minutes before a peculiar discrepancy popped up. Cannon told Rhoades that Coppermark had been sending in complaints for years. Stephanie Lee and Greg Cannon are shown with their binders full of insurance department complaints. (J.C. Hallman/Oklahoma Watch) “Yeah, we know, we’ve got 50 of ‘em,” Rhoades said. “Fifty?” Cannon said. “I’ve got 300!” Rhoades then said the true number the department had received was “50-plus,” but the discrepancy went unresolved in the conversation. In the months to come, Coppermark would send the insurance department a pointed letter documenting the call, and the legal department would respond with a terse rejection of all of the complaints. Leery of spending another $30,000 on a lawsuit, Coppermark set aside the 10 huge binders filled with the complaints they had filed. They began to suggest to their clients that they submit complaints directly, sometimes including materials prepared by Coppermark. 63 Months In the years that followed, Coppermark handled hundreds of State Farm claims. Cannon and Lee testified in numerous State Farm legal proceedings as expert witnesses. “Last year, we were in deposition four times one month on State Farm claims alone,” Cannon said. In some of the depositions, State Farm attorneys attempted to discredit their testimony. “They’ve done everything in the world to try to prevent us from helping their insureds,” Lee said. State Farm did not respond to a request for an interview about Coppermark and the case of Shaun and Karen Powers. However, in December, the company issued a statement about Oklahoma homeowners claims that attested to close coordination with the insurance department. Cannon and Lee did not think again of the peculiar 2021 phone call until December, when Oklahoma Watch began covering hundreds of bad-faith roof claims and the attorney general’s intervention. Coppermark contacted Oklahoma Watch shortly after it published a story that included a November 2023 recording of Commissioner Mulready describing an ongoing investigation of roof claims. The 2023 recording and the 2021 phone call appeared to overlap. In the 2023 recording, Mulready said that the investigation had been undertaken because of an uptick in complaints. After several years in which complaints about a particular insurance company had remained flat, the department suddenly received 53 complaints in a single year, Mulready said. He did not indicate which year. The numbers line up. In 2021, the phone call from Rhoades at the insurance department described 50-plus complaints. In 2023, Mulready specified 53 complaints. In December, Mulready again referenced the investigation of roof claims in a press release responding to the attorney general’s State Farm intervention. That suggested an investigation that had lasted at least 28 months, which is significantly longer than a typical insurance department investigation. The Coppermark complaints suggest that the investigation may be even older. Lee was convinced. Even though their complaints had been denied, she believed the insurance department had relied on their complaints to launch an investigation. “Yeah, 100% that uptick was because of us,” Lee said. Lee and Cannon estimated that, at first, they had submitted approximately 20 complaints about State Farm electronically. When those went ignored, they started printing hard copies for their binders and sending them in via certified mail. There were 30 of those. If Lee is right, then the insurance department’s investigation of roof claims, which Mulready has promised will be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2026, may have lasted 63 months. Mulready refused an interview request for this story. “This Job Has Been My Entire Life” The storm that destroyed the home of Shaun and Karen Powers hit three months after the phone call that put an end to Coppermark’s strategy of flooding the insurance department with complaints. Coppermark assisted Shaun Powers with his claim. State Farm issued a report that estimated the Powers’ replacement cost at $3,056.29. A Coppermark report estimated damage on two separate structures at $58,041.99. Cannon and a State Farm adjuster conducted a joint inspection in December 2021. Two days later, State Farm rejected the Coppermark report. “State Farm is not approving payment for replacing the roof surface of either structure,” a State Farm letter said. It was all too much for Karen Powers, Shaun Powers said. “She went downhill very quickly after that,” he said. “It was just one setback after another.” He encouraged his wife to give up her job at a State Farm agency. By then, Shaun Powers said, as the number of denied roof claims coming through her office multiplied, Karen Powers had begun advising clients to move their business to independent agents. But she couldn’t quit her job. “She said, ‘I can’t lose my job. This job has been my entire life,’” Shaun Powers said. In 2023, the family had Fourth of July plans. Karen Powers went to work on the morning they were to leave on vacation, and then visited a hospital for a blood transfusion that was part of her cancer treatment. A broken vial required additional blood to be drawn. The extra blood loss caused Karen Powers to pass out; she was admitted to the hospital. “She never came home,” Shaun Powers said. “She never made it back to work.” The final insult from State Farm came just hours after Karen Powers died, early on the morning of August 2, 2023. Shaun Powers came home from the hospital at 4 a.m. State Farm called a few hours later. They sent a check for $14,000 and canceled the Powers’ homeowners policy. A Bag of Skittles Greg Cannon has been left with sharp feelings about how insurance companies conduct their business in the absence of true regulation from the Oklahoma Insurance Department. “They’re able to basically rape and pillage, unchecked,” Cannon said. “They can raise their rates, and they can do anything they want. They’re going to take Oklahomans’ money, and they’re going to pay out hurricane victims in Florida with our money while keeping their bottom line.” Shaun Powers’ feelings, directed at State Farm, were even more visceral. “You want to say that it’s water under the bridge,” Shaun Powers said. “But you know, God forgives and God forgets, but I don’t. I’ll eat a bag of Skittles and watch you burn in Hell.” His resolve was all he had left. “I can’t do anything, but I’ll never forget what State Farm did,” Shaun Powers said. “I’ll never forget how they treated my wife.” J.C. Hallman covers a variety of topics for Oklahoma Watch. Contact him at [email protected]. The post State Farm Denies Roof Claim of Agency Employee Dying of Cancer appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less