Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : COURTS : Disneyland Ordered to Pay Damages to Stabbing Victim’s Family
A Disneyland nurse’s decision to send stabbing victim Mel C. Yorba to a hospital rather than call paramedics to the Anaheim amusement park was negligent, a Superior Court jury decided, and as result the park should pay $600,000 to the young Riverside man’s family.
“We knew we were right,” said Ellen Reynolds, Yorba’s mother, of the decision reached after only three hours of deliberation by the jury in the wrongful death suit she had filed.
The nearly two-week-long Superior Court trial was largely an attack on Disneyland’s emergency procedures and a challenge to the performance of park employees on March 7, 1981, when the 18-year-old Yorba was stabbed in Tomorrowland after a scuffle with another visitor, James O’Driscoll of San Diego, who is serving a 16-year-to-life prison sentence for second-degree murder.
Jury foreman David Scott, 23, of Brea said jurors were unanimous on the issue of Disneyland’s negligence and that the 9-3 vote merely reflected a disagreement over the amount of damages that should be awarded.
Scott said the critical evidence was a written list of procedures and policies compiled by Disneyland management, which required that paramedics be called in all life-threatening cases. Elizabeth Santy Micco, a registered nurse employed by the park, testified that she decided to send Yorba to a hospital immediately, rather than summon paramedics.
“Disneyland didn’t follow their own standard operating procedures,” Scott said.
Yorba was stabbed with an 8 1/2-inch knife through the tip of the heart, diaphragm and liver, and exhibited no vital signs when he arrived at the hospital. One of the two physicians who treated him said, “I think only God could have saved him.” The other doctor said he felt Yorba would have died even if he had been stabbed “in the operating room.”
A trauma surgeon testified, however, that Yorba stood a 50% chance of surviving if he had received proper emergency medical care.
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