Gathers’ Mother Is Expected to Get $545,000 : Jurisprudence: Settlement could be reached Monday. She signs document releasing Loyola, athletic director, trainer.

The mother of Hank Gathers is expected to complete a settlement with Loyola Marymount University for $545,000 in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday. That will dismiss the school and two of its employees from a $32.5-million wrongful-death suit filed more than two years ago.

Gathers’ mother, Lucille, signed a document Friday, releasing Loyola, Athletic Director Brian Quinn and former trainer Chip Schaefer from the suit, said her attorney, Bruce Fagel. The settlement will be the last in a series that has slowly reduced the list of 12 original defendants in the wrongful-death portion of the suit, leaving only Gathers’ internist, Michael Mellman, and his medical practice, Mellman and Moe, as defendants.

Fagel says he plans to dismiss Mellman and his practice Monday, because it wouldn’t make monetary sense to proceed solely against them.

But Fagel also said that the case is far from over. In two other causes in the original suit, the Gathers family--which includes Gathers’ mother, his brothers Derrick and Charles and an aunt, Carole Livingston--sued two doctors who treated Gathers on the basketball court at Gersten Pavilion after he collapsed while playing in a West Coast Conference tournament game on March 4, 1990. Gathers died shortly thereafter.

That portion of the suit charges negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress against Dan Hyslop of Loyola’s Health Services department and Benjamin Schaeffer, the doctor on duty that night supplied to Loyola by the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Group of Inglewood, which is also named. Hyslop is an independent contractor who works at Loyola and was not included in the school’s settlement.

Monday’s hearing was originally set for the second part of a mandatory settlement conference, but there is little chance that the remaining defendants will offer the Gathers family any money.

“We have no plans to come up with money on Monday,” said Steve Van Sicklen of the firm Baker, Silberberg & Keener in Santa Monica, the attorneys for Schaeffer and the Kerlan-Jobe clinic. “There is no merit to (the suit) and we plan to defend it.”

Hyslop’s attorney said he also plans to see the case through trial, scheduled for April 27.