Good Samaritans: Can They Afford Legal Eagles? By John Millrany - May 23, 2001Good Samaritans, it seems today, are harder to come by because, as the cliché goes, the do-gooder may have a well-founded fear of getting sued. But such concerns didn’t have any play when it came to a group of volunteers who tried to mitigate a trashy area in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles.
However…how would you like to be greeted with a $25 million wrongful-death suit with your morning coffee? That’s what has happened to some well-intentioned neighbors who donated the equivalent of $100,000 in time, labor and federal funds they solicited.
The situation was summarized by these headlines in a Los Angeles Times piece by George Ramos:
Suit Blames Volunteers for Traffic Death…family of the victim says beautification work on median and underpass played a role in crash.
"By all accounts," Ramos wrote, "the junction of Silver Lake Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway was a mess. Weeds were everywhere. The street’s three median islands, paved-over slabs of concrete and asphalt, were unsightly. And people routinely used the brush near the freeway off-ramps as their bathroom.
"Volunteers decided to beautify the area they consider the ‘gateway’ into Silver Lake, a community between downtown and Hollywood where hillside hippies mix with new immigrants."
Wouldn’t you know it—somebody got killed in the wake of the beautification, thus the basis for the suit. Making matters more dicey, the city of Los Angeles filed a cross-complaint against the defendants, advancing the rationale that such action is routine to protect the city should it lose the suit. According to Ramos, city officials are confident that the suit will be thrown out.
The suit was brought by Robert M. Zavidow of Long Beach on behalf of 20-year-old Kwang Min Kim, who, when his car glanced off a truck which was making a left-hand turn from the southbound lanes of the boulevard onto the freeway’s southbound off-ramp, crashed into a light pole and was killed. (Zavidow, whom the newspaper said didn’t return phone calls, represents Kim’s family.)
Officials point to at least two reasons that the Kim suit is dubious: Kim allegedly was "greatly in excess" of the 25 mph speed limit on the boulevard—and Kim’s blood-alcohol level was .15%, well above California’s permissible level of .08%. |