Daughter of Slain Robber Awarded $1 : Courts: Jury says there were no ‘real damages’ to the child, whose father was killed by LAPD squad as he fled a holdup.

Saying there were no “real damages,” a federal court jury Friday made the minimum award of $1 to a young girl whose father was killed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite SIS unit as he fled a 1990 robbery in Sunland, six days before she was born.

The verdict against Johanna Trevino in the high-profile lawsuit came after a four-day trial. It climaxed almost three years of extremely complicated litigation, including two mistrials and appeals all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court involving attempts to make members of the Los Angeles City Council pay damages from their own pockets.

The verdict, however, does not end the legal saga that began when SIS officers shot four robbers they observed holding up a McDonald’s restaurant, killing three of them. The officers are currently the target of a federal grand jury investigation into whether they should stand trial on charges of violating the robbers’ civil rights.

The separate civil suit before U. S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts was unique among police brutality cases because it addressed a legal wrong committed against an unborn child, and presented the tricky task of measuring the loss to a girl, now nearly 5, who never knew her father.

But after deliberating for two days, the eight-member jury concluded that Johanna “has not and will not incur real damages” because of her father’s death. The child, who lives with her mother and stepfather in Veracruz, Mexico, was not in court when the verdict was read.

Jurors said later that they struggled with their sympathy for Johanna, a round-faced girl who wore a red bow in her hair in court, doodled on legal paper and slept across her grandmother’s lap throughout the trial. But they also said they were hard-pressed, given the trial’s limited testimony, to find proof she was permanently damaged.

“We just didn’t hear anything that said there was damage to the child,” said one juror, a 52-year-old woman who said she has four children and four grandchildren. “We did see her in court and those of us with children . . . know how they behave and there was no sign of damage. She was well-behaved.”

The fact that Johanna’s father was killed while committing a crime, which the city’s defense tried to emphasize throughout the trial, did not influence their decision, said the jurors, who declined to give their names.

The city’s only witness, psychiatrist Eugene Malitz, testified that Johanna couldn’t really suffer a “loss” in the conventional sense for a parent who died before she was even born.

“It’s the loss of the relationship” that one grieves, Malitz said, “and if there is no relationship, there is no loss.”

But during closing arguments, Johanna’s lawyer, Stephen Yagman, said the little girl knows that “she doesn’t have a father because the police wrongfully took her father from her.”

Afterward, Yagman said he would appeal the verdict but otherwise declined comment.

Assistant City Atty. Don Vincent, clearly pleased by the victory after years of litigation, said he was not surprised by the outcome “because they had no evidence.” He also said he hoped the verdict would finally end the matter.

“This has been going on for a long time--five years on Sunday,” Vincent said.

It was on Feb. 12, 1990, that nine members of the LAPD’s Special Investigations Section killed Herbert Burgos, 27, Jesus Arango, 25, and Javier Trevino, 21, as they fled from the restaurant holdup. The officers said the robbers brandished guns, which were later shown to be air pistols. Trevino, Johanna’s father, was shot in the back of the head through the getaway car’s rear window, Yagman said.

A fourth man named Alfredo Olivas, who was seriously wounded but survived, was convicted of robbery for the early-morning heist and a series of other restaurant holdups and is now serving a 17-year state prison sentence at Pelican Bay.

The slain robbers’ survivors successfully sued the city and the Police Department in federal court for wrongful deaths, winning $44,042 in punitive damages. The jury said it kept the amount relatively low because it wanted the nine officers and then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to pay the money out of their own pockets. The City Council commonly authorizes payment from the city treasury of court judgments against city employees for actions taken on the job.

Yagman, an outspoken lawyer known for filing police brutality suits, was the attorney in that case as well as Johanna’s.

In 1992, the Los Angeles City Council voted to indemnify the sued officers despite the jury’s wishes. Yagman then filed suit on behalf of Johanna against the officers, Gates and members of the City Council. The suit originally sought to hold 10 council members personally liable for their votes, on the grounds that by protecting the officers financially, they were encouraging police brutality.

A victory would have been an unprecedented blow to the principle, common to all levels of U. S. government, that lawmakers cannot be sued for their official actions.

The Supreme Court let stand an appellate court ruling that under some circumstances, lawmakers could be held personally liable, a sizable victory for Yagman. But Letts dismissed the City Council members from the case last week, leaving only the issue of whether Johanna deserved any compensatory damages for her father’s unlawful death by police.

The jurors said no, awarding her only $1 in “nominal damages,” the minimum legal amount allowed when a civil-rights violation has occurred.

The girl could still claim punitive damages because of the punitive damages awarded in a related 1992 trial, but the most she could get, according to Vincent, would be a $9,100 share.

Johanna herself never testified. Letts denied Yagman’s attempt to put the girl on the witness stand, saying she was too young, and that her knowledge of the death was too limited, to give the jury any relevant information.

Only two witnesses testified on behalf of the girl--her paternal grandmother, Philadelphia Cruz, and a child psychiatrist, Justin David Call. Neither were very illuminating, jurors said.

The jurors said that Call’s testimony that Johanna would probably grapple with her father’s killing as she matured was “too speculative” and was based on two brief interviews with the girl at the courthouse.

On another front, Yagman met with federal prosecutors Thursday to try to persuade them to file criminal civil-rights and perjury charges against the officers.

In an impassioned letter sent this week to Assistant U. S. Atty. Michael J. Gennaco, who has been directing the grand jury probe, Yagman said he has evidence of perjury by 21 LAPD officers, Gates and former Mayor Tom Bradley, all of whom testified during the 1992 civil trial.

Yagman says the men were, in effect, ambushed by a “death squad” that had been keeping them under surveillance, and that they were not armed when the officers shot them in their getaway car.

Yagman also claims in the Feb. 8 letter to have photographs proving that police planted a gun in the robbers’ getaway car after the shooting. And he contends that he has information that the judge in the 1992 civil trial--Letts--wanted the police officers prosecuted for their actions and for perjury.

“This is a very serious matter and it should be treated as such rather than being given the short shrift usually given to potential federal prosecutions of local police in this community,” Yagman wrote.

The U. S. attorney’s office has declined comment.