City of Stanton to Pay Mother $395,000 : Settlement Ends Suit in Shooting of Boy by Officer

The mother of a boy fatally shot by a former Stanton police officer dismissed her $20-million lawsuit against the officer on Friday and accepted a $395,000 settlement from the city.

The settlement came four days before the wrongful death lawsuit brought by Patricia Ann Ridge was to begin trial in Orange County Superior Court and three years after 5-year-old Patrick Andrew Mason was accidentally killed in his mother’s apartment by Anthony Sperl.

Ridge and Sperl, who would have met for the first time at the trial, received the news at about the same time that neither would have to relive painful memories during a trial that had been postponed repeatedly and was expected to last nearly a month.

“They released me this morning 100% from the case--punitive damages, compensatory damages, everything--which proves me to be correct, which proves me to be right,” Sperl, 27, said Friday.

“I was vindicated by Stanton, by the Orange County sheriff, by the FBI, by the Orange County Grand Jury,” said Sperl, who retired on disability five months after the March 3, 1983 shooting. “Now I’m vindicated civilly. . . . I can go on with my life now.”

Ridge, 32, who moved to Chicago shortly after the shooting, could not be reached for comment Friday. But her attorney, R. Richard Farnell of Newport Beach, said, “She’s very happy. She’s glad to have it over with.”

Ridge, who until recently worked part time for $4 an hour at an auto parts store, will receive a check for her share of the settlement, minus attorney fees, in “two or three weeks,” Farnell said.

“She wants to put it away. . . . She doesn’t want to fritter it away,” Farnell said of the settlement. He would not say the exact amount Ridge will get after she pays his fee but called it “enough to be quite happy.”

Nancy Zeltzer, an attorney for the City of Stanton, said: “It was going to be a long trial and there (were) going to be tense proceedings, very sad issues, and it’s just a very, very sad story. And I think no one really wanted to go through that publicly.”

“But,” she said, “I think we had a good chance” of winning the lawsuit.

The shooting occurred after a parent at Patrick’s school reported that the boy had not been in class or seen for several days. Sperl was dispatched to Ridge’s apartment on the evening of March 3, 1983, to check on the family’s welfare.

When he received no response at their door, the officer entered Ridge’s apartment with a manager’s passkey and kicked open the door to the bedroom. Mistaking a toy gun Patrick pointed at him for a real weapon, Sperl drew his .357 magnum and shot the child in the neck.

With his holster still circling his hips, Patrick clung to Sperl’s leg, gazed up at him and died.

Could Not Afford Baby Sitter

Ridge said that she had left her son alone when she left for her job charging batteries at an auto shop because she could not afford a baby sitter and was unable to reach a friend who had previously taken care of her son.

The mother said she had tied the door to his bedroom shut with a shoelace and left Patrick with milk and cookies and a small black-and-white television set.

Ridge’s subsequent lawsuit against Sperl and the City of Stanton alleged that her constitutional rights and those of her son were violated when Sperl entered their apartment and that the city improperly trained and supervised the officer.

The suit also challenged some of the Police Department’s policies, particularly the policy of entering homes to check on someone’s welfare.

No Indictment

An Orange County Grand Jury was asked in 1983 to determine if the mother or the officer should be criminally indicted--Sperl for negligence or Ridge for endangering her only child when she left him alone.

In what jurors said was the most anguishing case in their year of service, the panel decided not to indict either of them.

Farnell and other attorneys in the case said Friday that the lawsuit might have been settled months ago had Farnell known that information he felt “was an important aspect of our case” did not exist.

The attorney said he learned Friday morning during a settlement conference that he was mistaken in his belief that a blood test showed that Sperl had traces of marijuana in his blood at the time of the shooting.

Different Case

In fact, the blood test in question that had been performed by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department crime lab concerned another former Stanton police officer, who was involved in a fatal shooting of a suspect several weeks before Patrick Ridge was killed, and who subsequently resigned rather than be fired, according to sources familiar with the case.

“What I learned was that I didn’t have any information” that Sperl was under the influence of marijuana, Farnell said. “I think it (the case) would have been” settled sooner had he known that his information was wrong.

Though Zeltzer said she believed that the city had a good chance of winning the case, she would not be specific about why Stanton decided to pay Ridge the $395,000 at the “eighth or ninth” settlement conference among attorneys during the 3-year-old case--and on the last working day before the trial was scheduled to start.

However, another attorney closely involved in the case said the company that insures the City of Stanton--and would have been responsible for paying any judgment against the city--was concerned about a last-minute substitution in its legal counsel and decided to settle the case Friday rather than risk losing it.

Zeltzer said that, through March, Stanton’s legal fees in the Ridge case had mounted to more than $100,000, a bill paid by the city’s insurance carrier.

Orange County Superior Court Judge John C. Woolley, who was assigned the case, said the cost of using his court room alone would have been $2,500 daily for a trial estimated to take nearly 20 days.

Times staff writer John Spano contributed to this story.