County Is Advised to Settle Amputee’s Suit for $1 Million

An attorney representing the county has agreed to recommend approval of a $1-million settlement, payable over the next 30 years, to a man whose right leg had to be amputated after he was held in restraints for eight days at Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail.

Antonio Mendoza, 39, of Sun Valley, was in the jail on an eight-day sentence for drunk driving when the 1993 incident occurred.

Although the plaintiff’s and defense briefs differ on many points, there is agreement that after an altercation in the jail with two sheriff’s deputies, Mendoza initially received extensive medical treatment. But he was then placed in restraints and his right leg later had to be amputated.

“This is not only a civil rights case, but medical malpractice as well,” said one of his attorneys, Sonia Mercado. “There was not one medical expert who viewed the pictures [of Mendoza’s injuries] and did not view them as gross. One viewed them as equivalent to medieval torture.”

For five days, Mendoza was held in what is called the “four-point restraint.” Under this procedure, as described Tuesday by a sheriff’s spokesman, an inmate is tied to the bed frame with 1 1/2-inch-thick leather straps secured to each foot and hand. The legs are fully extended; one hand is at head level and the other at the waist. For three additional days, Mendoza was in three-point restraint. Neal Moore, the private attorney retained by the county to represent Sheriff Sherman Block and others named in the lawsuit, maintained in his brief that Mendoza’s “severe alcoholism and undiagnosed diabetes” caused the amputation “at least in part.”

But in an interview, Moore said he decided to recommend the settlement to the Board of Supervisors rather than allow the case to go to trial out of concern that a jury would award even higher damages.

In an allusion to a recent $15.9-million judgment against the Sheriff’s Department in a case involving arrests and beatings of Samoan Americans at a party, Moore asked, “Have you read the newspapers lately?”

He noted that if the $1,049,000 Mendoza settlement is approved, the county will buy an annuity from an insurance company at a discounted amount, and Mendoza will be paid about $35,000 a year. He would also get free medical care for his injuries for life.

R. Samuel Paz, another Mendoza attorney, saw the case in a wider context.

“This is the second case I’ve had involving the use of restraints, and the first one caused death,” he said. Carl Bruaw died after being put in restraints in 1990, when an embolism traveled through his leg and into his heart.

“The thrombosis in this case stayed in the ankle, but Mendoza was also hurt in his hand and the whole right side,” said Paz. “He lost the use of his middle right finger and has weakness in his right hand and shoulder, and that means a lot when you’re a worker, as he is, performing a manual task.”

Mendoza, who worked as a painter in an auto body shop, recalled in an interview that when he was put into the four-point restraints and kept there, “I felt very desperate, very bad . . . I thought I was going to die.”

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Even now, two years later, he said, “I cannot work, I cannot bend down and I get very tired.” One reason, he explained, is that the prosthetic device he originally was given “is not a leg for walking. This is a leg to be used only with crutches. It’s just a standing leg.”

Under the medical section of the recommended settlement, Mendoza is to get a better prosthesis.

Looking back on his time in jail, he said that initially, “I wasn’t afraid because I believed I would only be there a few days.”

Mendoza and his attorneys assert that the altercation that caused his original injuries came when, working as a trusty outside his cell, he became lost and ended up at a module specifically for inmates who were under mental observation. When he “kept verbally insisting that he was indeed in the wrong module . . . various deputy sheriffs . . . initiated an altercation with [him],” according to Mendoza and the attorneys.

Although Mendoza said he was “‘not combative, threatening, cursing, nor yelling or screaming,” he was still placed “on four-point restraints for five days . . . when due to stench and oozing of his right ankle and severe infected ulceration on his right leg, [the] right ankle restraint was taken off and he was reduced to three-point restraints,” his attorneys say in their brief.

“The jail medical records indicate,” the brief continues, “that although he was supposedly physically monitored every 15 minutes by nurses, examined every two hours for range of motion of each extremity, and examined once a day by a doctor, Mr. Mendoza [after three days in three-point restraints] was discovered in an altered mental state due to intense pain, essentially starving . . . grossly ulcerated bed sores, dehydrated . . . and with severe total body infection.”

Finally, he was transferred to County/USC Medical Center by ambulance, where, 11 days later, despite efforts to save his gangrenous leg, it had to be amputated, first above the ankle, and then, when infection persisted, three weeks later below the knee, the brief reports.

Mendoza’s legal team submitted numerous gruesome photos of his injuries.

In his defense brief, however, Moore insisted that Mendoza’s account of the altercation with deputies was much exaggerated and “totally obscured and distorted” by “delirium . . . as a result of his withdrawal from alcohol addiction” and that it was his recalcitrance that caused the fight in the first place.

After being treated and placed in the jail hospital ward, according to the defense brief, Mendoza was placed in restraints “for the protection of himself and others.”

“The jail medical records indicate that [Mendoza] was seen regularly by nurses and doctors during this period. He did develop a problem with circulation in his right leg,” and, the brief continues, “almost two weeks later, he underwent a below-the-knee amputation.”

A doctor consulted by the defense concluded that this was due “in part to diabetes and alcoholism, both of which compromised his circulatory system,” the Moore brief said.