I hope that our companies are our legacy and not our lawsuits." Yarro case Even when he was with Novell, Noorda had begun experiencing some memory lapses, a condition that was confirmed publicly at the time. By 2004, the 80-year-old Noorda was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and a bitter fight broke out between Noorda family members and Canopy Group executives. On 17 December 2004, Noorda and other shareholders ousted chief executive Yarro, chief financial officer Darcy Mott, and corporate counsel Brent Christensen, accusing them of having taken amounts of at least $25 million from Canopy Group through "a series of self-dealing and wasteful transactions". Yarro and the other executives sued in the Utah District Courts for $100 million for wrongful termination, claiming that Noorda had been unduly influenced, and Canopy countersued the three men. Each of the opposing parties in the lawsuits accused the other of taking advantage of Noorda's diminished state. On 8 March 2005, the day before initial hearings were scheduled to begin, both parties negotiated a settlement out of court, ending the litigation. Yarro, Mott, and Christensen remained terminated, but an undisclosed amount of money was paid by the Canopy Group to them. Canopy agreed to relinquish ownership of all its 5.49 million shares in The SCO Group, transferring them to Yarro along with an undisclosed sum of money. Yarro thus became The SCO Group's largest shareholder, owning about a third of it, and kept his title as chairman of its board. While SCO remained a tenant in a Canopy Group building, there was no further connection between the two firms. Yarro, Mott, and Christensen resigned from any other Canopy companies they had been involved with. Outside of Utah, much of the news of the conflict and settlement was filtered through its possible effect on the SCO Group and SCO's battle against Linux. But locally, there was an acute additional sense of loss around the conflict. There was the scene of people squabbling amidst a computer industry pioneer's prolonged decline. And, as the Salt Lake Tribune wrote, "Suicides have ended up becoming the tragic bookends for the bitter struggle to control Utah's Canopy Group." The first was when Robert L. Penrose, Canopy's director of information systems and technology, died of suicide in December 2004, days after becoming distraught at the ouster of Yarro and the others, and the second was when Ray Noorda's daughter Val Noorda Kreidel,