Jury Finds Caltrans Not Liable in Car Accident : Lawsuit: Woman who lost her legs after auto hit her says state was to blame because repaving projects made the road unsafe.

Six years after an accident on Pacific Coast Highway cost a Culver City woman her legs, a Ventura County jury decided Friday that Caltrans was not responsible.

Karen Tsuda, now 37, had claimed in a lawsuit that the state Department of Transportation was liable because several repaving projects made the road unsafe.

The accident occurred the afternoon of Jan. 23, 1985, after Tsuda and her boyfriend had parked on PCH while fishing at Point Mugu State Park a few miles south of Oxnard. Tsuda was retrieving a sweater from the vehicle when a southbound car drifted off the road and struck her. Her legs had to be removed above the knees and she has no feeling below the waist.

Caltrans attorney Alexander B. Devorkin argued that the driver, Douglas Urbach, was solely responsible for the accident. Urbach, whose insurance company paid Tsuda a settlement of slightly more than $1 million, was not intoxicated. He testified that he did not know what caused his car to run off the road.

But Tsuda’s attorney, Richard B. Wolf, said the accident was caused by Caltrans’ failure to follow its own design and safety standards.

He presented evidence that in the decade before the accident, the agency progressively narrowed the highway’s paved shoulder from 8 feet to 4 feet. Parking was still allowed, “even though a person could not park safely off the highway,” Wolf said.

The evidence also showed that a 1983 re-surfacing resulted in a 5% slope from the center to the edge of the southbound lane--more than double the Caltrans maximum slope of 2%--which made it easier for cars to drift off the road, Wolf said.

In his argument to the jury, Devorkin noted that between 1983 and 1985, only two accidents, including Tsuda’s, were recorded on the two-tenths-mile stretch of highway involved. “If this road was designed so poorly, why weren’t there more?” he asked.

The low accident rate weighed heavily in the jury’s deliberations, juror Cameron McCluskey of Simi Valley said. He said the only element that some jurors considered dangerous was the fact that parking was allowed.

Wolf had asked for $7.75 million to compensate for past and future medical bills, lost wages and other expenses. He suggested between $15.5 million and $23.2 million to compensate the victim for pain and suffering.

But once the jury determined that the road was safe, the question of damages was moot.

Tsuda and the several family members who sat with her during the 4-week trial declined to comment after the verdict.

McCluskey said the jury felt sympathy for Tsuda, who sat through the trial in her motorized wheelchair.

“The injuries were obviously of great magnitude,” he said. “It was very difficult to walk back into the courtroom.”