Record Settlement Near in Personal-Injury Case

Forty-four-year-old Carol Adkins sits in a Florida apartment, fed intravenously through a tube to her stomach. Sometimes she opens her eyes or bats a balloon with a stick.

These days, she communicates by blinking her eyes. One blink is yes; two is no.

Her family clings stubbornly to the hope that her condition--her doctors say she is “post comative”--will improve, but any progress will take years.

It costs about $30,000 a month to keep her alive, her attorneys say. She is supposed to live another 30 years.

Twenty-two months after she was crushed in her rented car in a freak pileup involving a Los Angeles maintenance truck on the Hollywood Freeway, Adkins’ attorneys said Monday that they have reached a tentative $19-million settlement with the city.

If approved, it would be the largest settlement reached with the victim of a personal-injury case in city history, Senior Assistant City Atty. Dan Woodard said.

The agreement has yet to be approved by the Los Angeles City Council. It is set to go before the Budget and Finance Committee on Wednesday, and Woodard said he hoped that it would go before the full council by the end of the week.

Six of the lawsuits filed by victims and their families in connection with the March 1998 accident have been settled, Woodard said, including a $2-million settlement in October with the family of Roger Randall, who was killed. Five lawsuits remain.

But the size of Adkins’ settlement glosses over the human costs involved.

The payments would be made in cash in four installments--$11 million by the end of January, $3 million by July 31, $3 million in 2001 and $2 million in 2002.

Attorneys and family members say the determined single mother of two teenage daughters had nearly reached her professional goals when the accident occurred.

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Adkins, who taught nursing at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, was an oral dissertation away from getting her PhD. She had received a teaching offer from Columbia University in New York and was looking to do seminars in England.

“She was ready to roll,” said her older brother, Richard Birt.

She also had just become engaged to John Norris, who she was visiting in Newbury Park on the day of the accident.

Photos from the days before the accident show a glowing Adkins skiing at Big Bear and hiking in Joshua Tree. The morning of the accident, Adkins visited Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to observe the hospital.

“When she was airlifted up to Cedars, some of the nurses recognized her,” said her attorney, Richard Ferko.

Investigators believe that Louis C. Gysin fell asleep at the wheel of his southbound city truck March 5, 1998, as he neared Universal Center Drive.

The 4-ton cherry picker careened across several lanes of freeway, plowed through the center divider, became airborne and passed over a car before landing on its side on the northbound freeway. It slammed into a van, killing Randall, and came to rest atop Adkins’ white sedan.

The boom of the crane crushed Adkins car, pinned her head and shattered her left arm, said another of Adkins’ lawyers, Nicole Rapp. Firefighters rushed to the scene, cut the roof off the car and tended to the trapped victim until she could be freed.

“We have videos of the whole thing,” Rapp said. “One firefighter--the minute he got there--he sat with her, held her head for an hour, talked to her and talked to her. In the early part, you can hear her, she was conscious and then that was it.”

Within a year of the accident, Adkins exhausted her own $1 million in insurance. She then went onto Medicare and lost many benefits of her private insurance, such as physical therapy.

Early in 1999, the city gave Adkins an advance payment of $100,000, and a second payment of $200,000 was made in December--but her attorneys said the payments do not even cover her medical costs.

With the possible settlement on the horizon, her family is hopeful.

Her brother has moved back to Florida to help care for her. Norris took four months off work after the accident to visit her every day at the hospital while she was still in California, flew to see her on weekends when she went home to Florida, and moved to Florida near the end of last year to be with her.

These days, she can hold on to a ball and stack plastic doughnuts in order on a children’s toy. She sticks out her tongue when she doesn’t like things and sometimes she talks in her sleep. Her brother says she can follow her loved ones across the room with her eyes.

“She was very determined. Anything she ever wanted to do, she would always accomplish it. That’s what gives us incredible hope,” Birt said. “There’s just lots of layers we have to peel back before she’ll be where she was.”

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds contributed to this story.