Christo Attorney Says He Has Seen No Proof Umbrella Hit Woman : Art: Scott Hodes insists ‘we are not responsible.’ Officials still blame the giant parasol that was caught in high winds.

A lawyer for environmental artist Christo said Tuesday he has been shown no proof that a woman killed near one of the artist’s giant umbrellas in Tejon Pass was actually struck by the umbrella, which official reports blame for the death.

“There is no one who has told us that it hit her,” said Scott Hodes, a Chicago-based lawyer. “There are some people who are not certain that the umbrella hit her at all,” he said, referring to witnesses he said he had interviewed.

The Kern County Sheriff’s Department and coroner have attributed the death of Lori Keevil-Mathews, 33, of Camarillo to injuries suffered when she was hit by one of the 488-pound umbrellas, which was broken loose from its moorings along a county road by high winds Saturday.

The death caused Christo to order an immediate closing of the 3,100 umbrellas--1,760 in Tejon Pass and the remainder in Japan--five days before the scheduled end of the two-nation art project.

The Kern County sheriff’s report on the incident, based in part on a statement by Mathews’ husband, Michael Mathews, said she was “struck by the umbrella and pronounced dead at the scene.”

The Kern County coroner’s report attributed death to multiple injuries, including a broken neck and crushing facial injuries.

“The report we had says she was struck by the umbrella from behind and then pushed forward into the rocks,” Jim Malouf, chief coroner’s investigator, said Tuesday. “We can surmise that the injuries to her face came from the rocks. We can’t say at what point the neck was broken.”

Hodes, who has been Christo’s lawyer for 27 years, declined to speculate about what could have caused the injuries if not the umbrella. He said he had not yet spoken to Mathews’ husband and that his investigation was continuing.

“Our position is that we are not responsible,” he said. “This was an unexpected act of God, an act of nature.

“Nobody had any advance knowledge of this, and we took every possible precaution, under the circumstance, that this tragedy would not occur,” said Hodes in an interview from the project’s headquarters in Lebec.

Authorities on civil law have said that the fact that the wind apparently caused the death would not necessarily free Christo from liability for the death.

“An act of God in no means rules out liability,” said Prof. Gary Schwartz, a tort law specialist at UCLA law school.

Instead, he said, the determination of responsibility will hinge on a close look at whether the accident could have been prevented.

Mathews’ funeral will be at 11:30 a.m. today at Pierce Brothers Griffin Mortuary in Camarillo. Burial will be at a cemetery in Westlake Village.