MTA to Pay $1.85 Million to Teen Molested by Driver

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed Thursday to pay $1.85 million to a teenager who was molested by a bus driver in Hollywood nearly three years ago.

The payment settles a lawsuit that followed the conviction of former MTA driver Anthony Zaragoza, who pleaded guilty to molesting a 15-year-old boy and was sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison. Alone with the boy on June 20, 2001, Zaragoza drove his bus to a Hollywood side street and began making sexual advances. The boy, a North Carolina resident who was visiting Los Angeles, secretly turned on a video camera he was carrying and recorded the assault.

It compounded troubles for the MTA that Zaragoza had been hired by the transit agency’s predecessor, the Southern California Rapid Transit District, even though he had been convicted of armed robbery in 1980. After the assault, the MTA revised its hiring policy. It no longer hires convicted felons. The MTA’s board agreed to the settlement in a closed meeting.

David Ring, the boy’s lawyer, said the MTA had acted reasonably, particularly because his client has been battling an unrelated, life-threatening medical problem since the assault. “They could have just dragged this thing on and put my client through the wringer,” he said.

Also on Thursday, the MTA board voted to make the Expo Line light railway between downtown Los Angeles and Culver City the agency’s next big-ticket transit project, after construction of a train line to East Los Angeles that the agency hopes to start this year. The move put construction of the $500-million first leg of the Expo Line, terminating in the Culver City area, ahead of a $160-million plan to build dedicated bus lanes down Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually the MTA hopes to extend the Expo Line to Santa Monica.

In some ways, establishing the priority is an exercise in wishful thinking. Because of state and federal budget pressures, there simply isn’t any money to build the Expo Line.

The MTA also agreed Thursday to sell to the Los Angeles Unified School District nearly half of a six-acre lot atop the transit agency’s subway stop at Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

The district, which will pay about $5 million for the land, plans to build a school there.