Parents of Boy Pinned by Door Settle Suit for $4.8 Million

In one of the largest settlements in Ventura County history, the parents of a Simi Valley boy who was seriously injured by an automatic garage-door opener have agreed to drop their lawsuit in exchange for $4.87 million.

“It’s certainly one of the biggest, there’s no doubt about that,” a county courts official said of the settlement. It also is one of the largest settlements involving a defective garage-door opener, according to a spokesman for the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America.

The victim’s attorney, James T. Studer, said the case illustrates the dangers of some automatic garage-door openers, which have killed 46 children nationwide since 1981, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Naveed Hashemyar was 20 months old when he was injured at his family’s rented home in Simi Valley on July 16, 1990, according to a lawsuit filed in Ventura County Superior Court. The boy’s parents, Shakor and Sima Hashemyar, had recently arrived in the United States from their native Afghanistan with Naveed and their two daughters.

“The kids were outside with their mother,” said Scott Michael Schutz, attorney for More-O-Matic West, the Costa Mesa firm that assembled the garage-door opener. “Apparently the mother and the other kids went in, and somehow the little one got left behind, or he wandered back out after coming in.”

Sima Hashemyar found the toddler pinned at the neck by one of the corners of the garage door. Naveed was not breathing, but he was later revived at Simi Valley Adventist Hospital and flown to UCLA Medical Center.

Today, Naveed is a blind, semi-comatose quadriplegic who spends his days lying in a hospital-style bed at his home, Schutz said.

Under a settlement reached last month before Superior Court Judge Richard D. Aldrich, most of the settlement costs will be shared by Schutz’s client and by the designer of the door-opener, More-O-Matic Inc. of Wisconsin. About $500,000 will be paid by the owners of the rental home.

Shakor Hashemyar said Thursday that it was too painful for him to discuss the case at length.

“I am pleased with the settlement,” he said. “I have to do something for Naveed. . . . Of course, his care is very expensive.”

Schutz said that if the case had gone to trial, one of the defenses would have been that the child had not been properly supervised. “The problem with that defense is, it’s a very sympathetic case with a lot of emotional appeal to it,” he said.

Schutz said nobody knows what caused the door to close. Studer said the family was in the house and the mechanism went off by itself. “A lot of those older models were liable to do that,” he said.

The opener was installed in 1981 and apparently had not undergone any maintenance in subsequent years, Schutz said. The device was equipped with a reverse mechanism that was supposed to stop the downward motion if the door met any resistance, but apparently the device did not work, Schutz said.

Since 1991, the consumer safety commission has required garage-door openers to have a device that reverses the door’s action within two seconds if the door meets resistance, spokeswoman Stacey Reuben said. As a backup, the door openers also are supposed to have sensors that send the doors back up if they fail to close tightly within 30 seconds.

But the agency still recommends that consumers test their door openers once a month to make sure that the reverse mechanisms are operating properly, Reuben said.

To test a door opener, she said, the agency recommends placing a 2-by-4 board across the bottom of the door frame to prevent the door from closing tightly. If the door does not automatically go back up when it hits the board, the door opener should be repaired, Reuben said.