Headache Caused by a Helping Hand

Funny what can happen while walking your kids to school in the morning. You just might get sued by your hometown.

Yep, that’s a real rib-tickler. Especially when the whole thing starts with your trying to help another child in distress.

For some reason, Karen DiEugenio of Yorba Linda doesn’t see the humor in it: “It has been a constant battle,” she says. “I mean, just one thing after another.”

DiEugenio’s legal ordeal could end at any moment. It might even be over by the time you read this, because the Yorba Linda City Council was scheduled to meet last night and may have ended her misery.

Or not. As of late Tuesday afternoon when I talked to her, DiEugenio, 31, said she’d heard nothing to indicate that the city would drop a cross-complaint that has been hanging over her head since October. Back then -- on Halloween, in fact -- DiEugenio had been trick-or-treating with her children and returned to her parents’ home to discover a process server had left a goodie for her.

“I didn’t have the foggiest idea,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine what it was about.”

It was about an accident 11 months earlier that occurred while DiEugenio was walking her children, then 10 and 8, to the same Fairmont Elementary School she’d attended as a youngster. Her kids were in a group of children who started walking along a slope that fanned up from the sidewalk.

One of the kids, an 11-year-old boy she didn’t know, fell down and badly injured his knee on a pipe jutting out from the slope. “I didn’t realize he was hurt, at first,” DiEugenio says. “I thought he just tripped. I asked if he was OK and he just shook his head, with a horrified look on his face. As I got closer, I could see his knee gaping open and realized there was not a whole lot I was able to do for this kid, so I ran to get help.”

She flagged down two drivers, one with a cellphone to call 911 and the other who said he was a doctor. With the boy’s friends “crying and freaking out,” DiEugenio says she decided to walk them the rest of the way to school and leave the injured boy in the company of the two people who stopped.

That’s where it ended,

DiEugenio thought. She heard that the boy’s family sued the city. Then came the Halloween knock on the door.

In its complaint, the city contends DiEugenio had been “present and active in the circumstances leading up to and resulting in plaintiff’s alleged physical injury.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with the city doing that, on the presumption that DiEugenio -- as the only adult present -- might have borne some responsibility. For example, I’m imagining a situation in which an adult told a child to run into the street for a ball and the child got hit by a car.

DiEugenio was given 30 days to respond. Then the city gave her a 30-day extension. Then it gave her another. She says a lawyer for the city told her it likely would drop the case within 10 days of DiEugenio giving a deposition. On Jan. 7, she gave the deposition; nearly a month later, the complaint still lives.

Over the months, DiEugenio says, she’s been fed a diet of legalese and assurances that aren’t very assuring.

The city tells her she hasn’t had to spend any money on legal fees, so what’s the big deal.

Can anyone be that oblivious to the wear and tear such a protracted situation might have on a person’s psyche?

DiEugenio wonders what she’d do the next time she saw a child in need.

“I hope I would help. I’m sure I would, but ... this would be on my mind.”

I asked her Tuesday if she thought the end was near. “I’m not counting on anything,” she says. “I have appointments with two lawyers on Thursday.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.