DMV Told to Pay Millions by O.C. Jury

The state Department of Motor Vehicles should pay $4.1 million to three pedestrians who were hit in a crosswalk by a legally blind motorist, an Orange County Superior Court jury decided Friday.

The same jury had previously found the DMV negligent in giving a driver’s license to George Lizarralde, a Brea resident who was turned down for a license three times, then received one on the fourth try even though he flunked the vision test.

Deborah Ann Mohr, a 32-year-old Whittier woman who suffered brain damage and other permanent injuries in the accident, said she was happy with the jury’s “fair decision.”

“I would give up every penny to be able to walk normal again, to have my memory back again, and to have things back to normal,” said Mohr, who uses a metal cane to get around. “I hope this makes the DMV more responsible about giving out licenses.”

Bill Madison, a DMV spokesman in Sacramento, said the agency plans to appeal the decision. “We don’t think that we are responsible for the accident,” Madison said. “We don’t just issue licenses to people without testing them appropriately.”

Madison declined to elaborate, but state Deputy Atty. Gen. Barbara Annette Noble, who represented the DMV during trial, argued that the agency was immune from liability and should not be held responsible for the accident.

She said the accident occurred because Lizarralde took his eyes off the road to pick up a cassette player, not because of his poor vision.

An unanswered question raised during trial was how DMV employees could grant a license to Lizarralde, a legally blind man who has been receiving federal disability payments since 1979 for a debilitating eye disease. Lizarralde told attorneys in the case that his peripheral vision is so poor that if he sat across a table from someone, he could see only the person’s nose clearly, but not the entire face.

Juror James Ferrigno, a 54-year-old Mission Viejo resident, said he and other jurors believed that there was no intent on the DMV’s part to cause the accident, but that “someone at the DMV dropped the ball.”

Robert Michael Schultz, the presiding juror in the case, said the verdict should be a wake-up call for the department.

“I think the DMV has an enormous task and they do a fine job, but this might be an eye-opener, no pun intended,” said Schultz, a Mission Viejo resident and president of a financial company in Los Angeles. “They should re-look at some of their policies.”

The accident occurred on Aug. 4, 1990, when Lizarralde drove his Mazda RX-7 sports coupe through a marked pedestrian crosswalk in Norwalk. He slammed into Mohr, her former fiance, Brian Barber, and his young son, Dane, as they were walking to church.

The accident left Mohr in a coma for a month, and she ran up $350,000 in medical bills, her attorney, Christopher J. Day of Tustin, said in court papers. The father and son also suffered multiple injuries, and both walk with limps since the accident. Mohr said the accident ruined her marriage plans with Barber.

On Friday, jurors awarded $3.5 million to Mohr, $494,684 to Brian Barber and $154,000 to his 8-year-old son.

Barber said he hoped the verdict would cause the DMV to do a better job of screening applicants. “They have to be more aware of who’s getting licenses so all of our children will be safe,” he said.

The pedestrians had sued the DMV and Lizarralde, 33, after the accident, and it was not until depositions in the case that Day discovered Lizarralde was legally blind.

Lizarralde said that even though he failed the vision test, the DMV still sent him a license in the mail.

His lawyer, Roberta Coughlin, successfully petitioned Orange County Superior Court Judge Logan Moore to drop her client as a defendant in the case during the trial.

Both Coughlin and Day contended that the DMV was to blame for the accident, saying that Lizarralde never should have been allowed on the road.

The jurors agreed last week when, during the first phase of the trial, they found the DMV negligent in granting the blind Brea man a license.

Lizarralde had a valid driver’s license until last week. DMV spokesman Evans Nossoff said the agency canceled Lizarralde’s license after the jury found the DMV negligent in the civil case.

Nossoff said the agency did not taken action to cancel the legally-blind man’s license previously because it had no record of Lizarralde’s citation for the 1990 accident. Court records show that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department cited him at the time.

Legal experts say the case is far from over because the agency would exhaust the appeals process. Dana Clark, a law professor at Western State University College of Law in Irvine, said the DMV is certain to argue that it has broad immunity from liability in cases where government employees failed to make a determination that someone with a disability would threaten the safety of himself or others.

Day said Friday that he and his clients are prepared for a lengthy appeal by the state, and that he also believes DMV officials will lobby state legislators to grant the agency more immunity to prevent an onslaught of similar lawsuits.

Officials successfully petitioned the Legislature in the 1980s to make the DMV immune from prosecution in certain cases after two people sued alleging that officials issued a driver’s license to an 87-year-old Northern California man even though they knew he was unable to operate a motor vehicle safely, Day said.

In that case, Trewin v. State of California, there was evidence that the DMV drive test examiner observed the elderly man had “general debilities” but still gave him a license, according to court records.

“If the DMV’s own legislative history is any indication, they will go to the Legislature and say, ‘Give us more immunity,’ ” Day said. “You got employees handing out driver’s licenses to blind men and then say, King’s X, you cannot sue us because the law says you can’t.”