School District Faulted in Parking-Lot Mishap : Conejo Valley: Jury will decide later how much to award two of seven children injured in 1986 when a car suddenly accelerated.

The Conejo Valley Unified School District is responsible for a 1986 parking-lot accident that injured seven schoolchildren, a Ventura County jury decided this week.

Raymond P. Johnson, the attorney for one of two children who sued the district, said the jury found that a congested parking lot at Ladera School helped cause an accident in which a woman’s car suddenly accelerated, jumped a curb and struck the children.

The school district’s attorney, Korman Dorsey Ellis, called the decision “absolutely shocking because of the precedent it could set.”

“It establishes a duty on the part of the school district to provide a congestion-free parking lot,” Ellis said. He predicted a wave of suits against government agencies and businesses when accidents occur on crowded roads or parking lots.

The accident occurred the afternoon of March 6, 1986, as students waiting to be picked up stood next to the parking lot at the Thousand Oaks elementary school. Songhee Kwon, who was picking up her 6-year-old son, was pulling into a parking space when her car suddenly shot forward.

Johnson’s client, Heather Altreche, 9 at the time, and Alexander Constantinescu, 11, were pinned under the car until more than a dozen witnesses lifted it off the children. Heather suffered serious leg and pelvic injuries and Alexander had major burns. Five other children, including Kwon’s son, suffered lesser injuries.

It has never been established whether driver error or a mechanical malfunction caused the car to shoot forward, the attorneys said. The victims reached settlements with Kwon’s insurance company and with Toyota Motor Corp., the maker of the car.

The most damaging pieces of evidence against the district, the attorneys agreed, were the letters written by four principals over the years warning that the lot was dangerous.

The last of the four letters, sent to district administrators a year before the accident, called the congested lot “a long-standing and severe problem” and called for a fence “so if anything happens, something will protect the children.”

The letters “were our smoking guns,” Johnson said. He called the district’s failure to act on the warnings “a case of bureaucratic indifference.”

But Ellis insisted that the letters are irrelevant because there was no evidence that congestion caused the accident. “Just because a principal says it’s a dangerous situation, does that mean it caused a woman’s car to go out of control? It doesn’t follow. This is an outrage, really.”

The jury will return to Superior Court Judge Richard D. Aldrich’s courtroom July 9 to hear more evidence before deciding how much to award the children. Before the trial, the district had offered settlements of $100,000 for each child, Johnson said, adding that Heather’s medical bills alone surpassed that amount. He said he and the other child’s attorney, Lawrence W. Hait, will ask for at least $1 million per child.

“The jury let the taxpayers down on this one,” Ellis said. “It opened the public coffers to anybody who has an accident on a congested road or freeway.”

Supt. William Seavers said the district’s insurance should cover any damage awards.