Should Have Warned of Traffic Danger, Her Lawyers Contend : Officer Hit With Claim After Saving Woman

Last November, a young waitress named Margaret Parkinson was run down by a drunk driver as she helped a friend unload a bicycle from a car on a fog-shrouded street in Torrance.

Parkinson, 24, lost her lower right leg and nearly bled to death before two Torrance police officers saved her life by applying a makeshift tourniquet they fashioned from a rope and a knife.

Since the accident on Redondo Beach Boulevard, Parkinson has emerged from a coma and is slowly recuperating at a rehabilitation center in San Diego County.

The Torrance police officers have been lauded for their efforts: Parkinson’s father wrote a letter saying he was “terribly grateful” to Officer Devin Chase for saving his daughter’s life. And the South Bay Police and Fire Medal of Valor Committee presented Chase and fellow Officer Jerry Wallace with the Distinguished Service Award for their “courage and self-control” in rescuing Parkinson.

But lawyers for Parkinson, who was left partially paralyzed and brain-damaged by the accident, delivered a strikingly different message this month: a $6-million negligence claim that blames Officer Chase and the city for the accident.

“It’s a tragic irony,” conceded Parkinson’s mother, Nancy.

Chase said he was floored when he learned of the claim.

“You save someone’s life,” said Chase, 27, “and you are trying to do the job the best you can. . . . Down the road all these people come up, and unfortunately they are mostly attorneys, and they say how you are supposed to have done things differently.”

The claim centers on Chase’s actions before the accident, not afterward, said Parkinson’s father, Lucius (Jim) Parkinson. It alleges that Chase drove past Maggie Parkinson before the collision but failed to warn her not to stand behind her double-parked car on the fog-blanketed thoroughfare.

“If my daughter is going to be crippled for the rest of her life and I can find compensation,” Parkinson said, “I’m going to look for it.”

On Nov. 5, 1988, Maggie Parkinson and Ella Schwartz had just finished working their Friday night shifts as waitresses at the Cheesecake Factory in Redondo Beach.

It was past 2 a.m. on Saturday morning when Parkinson, who had moved from her hometown of Carlsbad to Torrance two months before, stopped to drop Schwartz off at her apartment at 3920 W. Redondo Beach Blvd.

The two women double-parked on the four-lane boulevard to unload the bicycle Schwartz had ridden to work, Nancy Parkinson said.

At the same time, Chase was driving west. A California Highway Patrol report on the incident says Chase recognized the danger of the two women standing, shrouded in fog, in the roadway.

Chase stopped to make a U-turn to warn them but, before he could turn, a car driven by Eduardo Banda Hernandez passed in the opposite direction, said CHP spokesman Richard Richards. Just seconds later, Hernandez’s swerving car missed Schwartz but slammed into Parkinson, Richards said.