Injured Cyclist Accepts $3.1-Million Settlement

The city and state have agreed to pay $3.1 million to an insurance salesman who suffered severe brain damage after he crashed his bicycle in a nature reserve, officials confirmed Tuesday.

James P. Murphy was not wearing a helmet when he hit a large puddle on a bike trail two years ago, but he said nonetheless that the city was liable for his injuries because it failed to properly maintain the path through the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve.

Court documents show that the four-foot-wide puddle that Murphy hit, and others like it, had plagued the road for years and that city officials knew about the puddle but did not adjust the drainage system to fix the problem.

Although details of the settlement, which will be paid out monthly over Murphy’s lifetime, have not been completed, City Council members and the plaintiff’s attorney said the total of $3.1 million had been accepted by both sides, making it perhaps the largest personal injury award in Newport Beach history. The state will pay less than 10% of the settlement, officials said.

“We’ve been through a lot, obviously,” Murphy, 47, said Tuesday, beginning to cry involuntarily because of his head injury. “Money just can’t replace anything that we’ve been through.

“I don’t think there’s any victory. What I’ve lost--you’re talking about giving away part of your brain--and most of all, what it represents to the rest of the family. . . . It’s been hard.”

Murphy, a 14-year resident of Newport Beach who was a varsity linebacker at USC in the 1960s, was earning $250,000 a year as an insurance salesman and financial planner for Pacific Mutual at the time of the accident. After three brain operations and more than four months in the hospital, Murphy has regained the ability to walk and talk, but he remains brain-damaged and is heavily medicated and under regular medical supervision.

The father of a grown son and daughter, Murphy works about 10 hours a week and collects some income from insurance accounts he sold during his more than two decades at Pacific Mutual.