Injured Cyclist OKs Settlement

Insurance companies representing the Orange County Register and one of its deliverymen have agreed to pay $1.475 million to a Dana Point man who was struck by the driver and critically injured while riding a bicycle.

“It’s a fair settlement,” Daniel J. Callahan, a lawyer for Robert Campbell, 67, said of the agreement announced Monday, the day the matter was set to go to trial in Orange County Superior Court. “My client is happy to get it resolved.”

Keith G. Hunter, a lawyer representing driver Alejo Nunez Ibarra -- an independent contractor for the newspaper -- said his client also was glad to have the matter behind him. “Liability for the accident was disputed,” Hunter said, “but because of the severity of the injuries suffered, I was very happy to get it resolved short of trial.”

A Register spokeswoman said the newspaper denies culpability in the incident and wasn’t involved in the settlement.

“In a lawsuit, plaintiffs make all kind of allegations,” Nancy Souza said, “and we deny all the allegations [in this one]. We don’t know why [the insurance company] agreed to the settlement.”

Campbell, who pitched briefly for a Cincinnati-based minor league team in the late 1950s, was taking his usual bike ride about 4:40 a.m. on July 25, 2001, when the accident occurred on Dana Drive in Dana Point Harbor.

As a result, Hunter said, Campbell spent several days in a coma and sustained a serious knee injury and brain damage that, to this day, limits his short-term and detail-oriented memory.

Eventually, according to Callahan, Campbell was forced to leave his job as director of support services for the Orange Unified School District.

“He’s relieved to have some funds to rely on in his retirement years now that he’s been forced to take early retirement,” the lawyer said. And though he was in great physical shape before the accident, Callahan said, Campbell now also “needs the money for future medical care.”

Ibarra denied suggestions that he had been on the wrong side of the road. But according to his lawyer, “experts who reviewed the case on both sides concluded that he had been partially on the wrong side of the street and was moving back” when the accident occurred.

Ibarra still delivers the Orange County Register to residents of Dana Point, Hunter said.