Crash victim is awarded millions

A Los Angeles jury awarded $6.9 million to a Compton woman who suffered brain damage as a result of getting struck by a speeding police vehicle, attorneys said Tuesday.

The jury delivered the unanimous verdict last week in the case of Sandra Griffin, 45, whose car was broadsided in 2006 on Imperial Highway in South L.A. by a police vehicle traveling 51 mph in a 35-mph zone without lights or sirens on. Los Angeles Police Officer Scotty Stevens swerved to avoid another vehicle and struck Griffin’s car, which was parked on the side of the street, Griffin’s attorneys said.

Griffin, a single mother of two daughters who also cared for elderly parents, was in a coma for a week and had fractures and injuries to her skull, hip, spleen and lungs. Even after months of surgeries and rehabilitation, brain damage left Griffin forever altered, her attorneys argued at trial.

“She went from someone that was functional and able to take care of the household to someone that needed to be cared for,” said Joseph Barrett, one of her attorneys.

At the trial, city attorneys presented a video, taken by an undercover investigator who monitored Griffin from across the street, in an attempt to show that her injuries were less severe than her attorneys contended. The video showed Griffin walk out of her home, talk to a neighbor, smoke a cigarette and return to the house, according to her attorneys.

Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the L.A. city attorney’s office, said the video was part of “standard procedure” in the city’s defense used to “paint a full picture of the extent of the injuries.”

Griffin’s older sister Betty Jackson, who testified at the trial, said in an interview that Griffin came home from the hospital “a totally different person” who didn’t remember things about her family, screamed hysterically saying God spoke to her and was kept awake by hallucinations of voices.

Jackson said Griffin was once a responsible, church-going head of household who drove her daughter to school and took her parents to medical appointments. Now, Jackson said, her sister spends most of her days bedridden and has to have someone watch over her.

“No one can pretend for two years,” Jackson said.

The city is considering whether to ask for a new trial or to file an appeal, Mateljan said.

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victoria.kim@latimes.com