Slain Tenant’s Child Awarded $1.3 Million : Courts: Judge levies penalty against landlord who killed the man after mistaking him for an intruder. The disabled girl requires special care.

It has been more than two years since the death of Mike Rodriguez, a young father fatally shot in the middle of the night by his landlord, who mistook him for an intruder.

Criminal charges were not filed against the landlord, Laimonis Dzidrums, but an Orange County Superior Court judge this week ordered him to pay $1.3 million in damages to Rodriguez’s 7-year-old daughter, who is handicapped and requires special care.

“The child has been denied the support of her father, both financially and emotionally,” said Larry Kirschenbaum, the Santa Ana attorney who represented the girl.

Judge James H. Poole ordered that Dzidrums pay $800,000 in punitive damages, $400,000 in special damages, $100,000 in general damages and $545 in legal costs.

Kirschenbaum said Wednesday that it is unknown whether the child will be able to collect the judgment because Dzidrums never responded to the civil lawsuit, which was filed in March.

Dzidrums could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

“Our job now is to try and collect, which might be difficult if (Dzidrums) has left the country,” Kirschenbaum said.

Rodriguez, 25, died Sept. 4, 1992, while trying to do a favor for friends who had just been evicted from their apartment in the 1100 block of West Highland St. in Santa Ana.

The evicted tenants told Rodriguez, who lived upstairs, that there was paperwork from the U.S. marshal’s office in the apartment that proved that they were entitled to live there for at least 10 more days.

At 2 a.m., Rodriguez climbed through a window of the boarded-up apartment to retrieve the paperwork--unaware that Dzidrums was sleeping on the living room floor with a gun at his side. The landlord later said he was spending the night there to keep the evicted tenants out.

Dzidrums waited nearly seven hours to notify police that he had shot Rodriguez.

The landlord was detained by police but not arrested. The Orange County district attorney’s office declined to press charges for lack of evidence, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Bob Parks said.

The day after the shooting, Dzidrums said in an interview that the delay in notifying police occurred because he was afraid to leave the apartment, which did not have a telephone, until someone picked him up the next morning.

“I don’t have time to think about anything,” Dzidrums said at the time. “You don’t see anything at night. You don’t question somebody at that time of night, in that place, under those conditions.”

Police found a knife next to Rodriguez’s body. The victim’s friends accused Dzidrums of planting it there. The landlord said Rodriguez had entered the apartment carrying the knife.

“We were never able to determine the source of the knife,” Parks said.

The lawsuit contended that if Dzidrums had summoned help immediately, Rodriguez might have had a chance of surviving.

The wrongful-death lawsuit was filed by Rodriguez’s widow, Norma Campos Rodriguez, on behalf of their daughter. The couple was estranged at the time of Rodriguez’s death.

“Mrs. Rodriguez feels very good about the settlement because it’s for the benefit of their daughter,” Kirschenbaum said.

Rodriguez had been living in the apartment of a friend, Rosario Escalante, 44. Escalante, furious that Dzidrums was never criminally charged, was the driving force behind the civil lawsuit.

“I had to do something,” Escalante said Wednesday.