Temblor Evokes Trainer’s Pain : Santa Anita: Earthquake in June of 1991 led to death of Lerille’s fiancee and seriously injured him as they sat in the grandstand.

As usual, trainer Art Lerille’s alarm clock in San Dimas was set for 4:30 a.m. Monday.

As usual, Lerille was awake about five minutes before the alarm went off. Dozens of years of working with horses will condition a man that way.

The rest of Lerille’s morning, though, was anything but usual. When the Northridge earthquake rocked the 58-year-old trainer’s house, there was an inevitable flashback.

“I’ve lived in Southern California all my life,” Lerille said. “I grew up in East Pasadena. And like a lot of Californians, I was never paranoid about earthquakes. But I started feeling differently after what happened on June 28, 1991.”

That innocent summer morning, Lerille and his fiancee, Juli Nickoley, were watching one of his horses work out from the Santa Anita grandstand. When the earth started moving, they began running down the stairs. It was the right thing to do, getting away from danger overhead.

But they didn’t quite make it. The earthquake centered in neaby Sierra Madre that day caused $1.1 million in damages at Santa Anita, and part of it was a 20-foot steel beam that fell on Lerille and Nickoley. It took three men to carry it away.

Nickoley was killed instantly.

Trainer Jerry Fanning, who was sitting on his pony near the outside fence of the track, saw the accident, dismounted and ran to help his friend.

“There was so much blood--I couldn’t believe Art was still alive,” Fanning said.

Lerille suffered multiple injuries. Doctors needed 22 stitches to close a gash in the back of his head. Three times, they have operated on his left shoulder, which has been fused together with a rod and screws. His left leg and left arm were broken, and he suffered a dislocated left ankle. He has had a bone graft and still walks with a limp.

All of that flashed by Lerille when the earthquake shook him at 4:31 a.m. Monday.

“I didn’t exactly hit the deck after that,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of cats, and they went bananas. I waited a couple of minutes and called the barn, to see if everything was all right.”

Jeff Lerille, the trainer’s son, who keeps even earlier hours than his father, answered the phone and said that their six-horse stable was OK. A couple of the horses had gotten loose for a few moments, but by the time Art Lerille called, they were under control.

Lerille hung up, not knowing what he was going to do next. On another earthquake day, could he go out to the track where his fiancee had been killed, conducting business as usual? For 10 months after Juli Nickoley’s death, he had talked over hypothetical questions with a psychologist, but they had never covered this situation.

A year to the day after the Sierra Madre earthquake that hit Santa Anita, there was the Landers-Big Bear quake on June 28, 1992, but that one didn’t count as a test for Lerille. He was at his sister’s place at Dana Point that day, and hadn’t planned on being at Santa Anita, anyway.

On Monday, Lerille finally gathered himself and headed for Santa Anita.

“I was late, though,” he said. “It took me a little time at home to get it all together. I think that if I didn’t have those two horses to breeze (work out), I would have stayed home.”

When Lerille got to Santa Anita, he knew he had made the right decision.

“I felt a lot better after I got there,” he said.

One thing Lerille will not do, however, is return to the spot in the grandstand where Juli Nickoley was killed. Vincent and Scarlett Timphony, who have a small string of horses at Santa Anita, might have been there, too, that day in 1991.

“Our jock--it might have been (Corey) Nakatani--was late to work our horse that morning,” said Scarlett, Vincent Timphony’s wife. “If he’d been on time, we’d have been right there, standing with Art and Juli.”

The Timphonys have told Lerille that story.

“I still think about why we were there,” Lerille said Monday. “That’s a place where I had never been to watch a horse work.”

All of that hardware in Lerille’s shoulder has caused problems. One of the screws wasn’t right, and an infection set in. He’s going to need three more screws inserted, and another bone graft is likely.

“I’m not sure when they’re going to do it,” he said Monday, after making it through another earthquake and the heartache that went with it. “I’m going to try to talk them into waiting, at least until Santa Anita is over.”