$500,000 Settles Mistaken Police Killing of Man

Huntington Beach has agreed to pay a total of $500,000 to the children of an unarmed 77-year-old man a police officer mistakenly shot to death in a warehouse two years ago, settling a wrongful-death lawsuit.

Theodore Franks bled to death after Officer Dean Michael shot him in the left leg while investigating a burglary.

Neal Moore, Huntington Beach’s attorney, said Monday the deal was the largest settlement against the police that he could remember in his 20 years of representing the city.

“The city decided that the facts were such it was something they had to accept liability for,” Moore said.

The City Council approved the offer Friday, Moore said, and the two sides reached agreement about noon Monday.

“Everybody had the opportunity to really reflect upon what’s important in our lives, that is, the relationships with the people we care about and we love,” said attorney Richard Cohn, who represented two of Franks’ children. “That’s what’s important about this lawsuit.”

Franks, an aerospace engineer for decades, had been developing spheres to mark high electric wires and keep aircraft from crashing into them. He also had developed a system of bolting the spheres to the wires by helicopter. He was supposed to leave the day after the shooting for a utility trade show in Denver to demonstrate his project.

To avoid the commute to his home in Temecula, Franks slept during the week in the offices of the small manufacturing firm where he worked on his project, in an industrial park just south of Huntington Beach Mall.

On Sept. 11, 1996, police were responding to a burglary call in the industrial park. Officers found the back door of the warehouse ajar and began searching the building. Franks stepped into the dim hallway, and Michael shot him. Franks slumped back into his bedroom and died nearly two hours later at UCI Medical Center in Orange.

The burglary call turned out to be unfounded.

The Orange County district attorney’s office investigated but declined to file charges against the police officer, calling it “an unfortunate incident.”

Michael was not disciplined, Moore said, but he left the department not long afterward. Moore said he had moved to the Sacramento area.

Michael had been with the department for seven years and had spent three previous years working for another law enforcement agency.

Although Franks’ children had initially expressed outrage that no one was charged in their father’s death, they seemed to have softened that attitude, Cohn said.

“I suspect Officer Dean Michael is a wonderful man who deserves as much sympathy as my clients, frankly,” he said. “My clients feel that way as well.”

The settlement will be divided evenly among Wayne Franks, who runs a machine and design shop in Texas; Marcia Franks Cobb, who works for an insurance company in Honolulu; and Dennis Franks, who lives in Lake Havasu City, Ariz.

Franks, a World War II veteran, also was survived by 14 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife had died three years earlier.

The settlement “just turned a terrible tragedy into a wonderful memory about a wonderful man,” Cohn said.