Ruling Leaves Crash Victim and Jury Perplexed : Courts: A judge overturned the $7.65-million award a paralyzed woman won from the city. She wonders how she'll pay for therapy; jurors wonders why they sat through trial.

By JANE FRITSCH

Aug. 8, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

On the subject of life’s disappointments, Susan Tartakoff speaks with some authority.

A traffic accident stemming from a police chase left her paralyzed from the waist down in 1985. And a related $7.65-million jury verdict she won last spring against the city of Los Angeles has been thrown out by a judge.

The ruling cancels the largest liability verdict ever levied against the city and leaves Tartakoff, 42, in bad financial shape with dwindling insurance benefits.

“I wasn’t aware that this could happen,” Tartakoff said Tuesday at her home in Northridge. “It was a big blow to me, because I don’t know where my life is going to stand.”

The decision by retired Superior Court Judge Paul G. Breckenridge Jr. also has angered jurors who sat through the three-week trial and weeklong deliberations. Several said they believe police officials lied during their testimony.

“What were we there for?” asked juror Robert F. Dudley. “It was a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

The 12-member jury concluded “without a shadow of a doubt” that the police were to blame, said Dudley, 36, an electrician at the Veterans Administration hospital in Westwood. “For her not to be compensated for the mishap is a damn shame.”

Tartakoff was returning home from a video store about 8 p.m. Jan. 11, 1985, with movies she rented for her husband when a car that had been traveling at up to 100 miles an hour slammed into her car at a Chatsworth intersection.

In her lawsuit, Tartakoff claimed that the 19-year-old driver was being chased by Los Angeles police officers, who failed to turn on their siren or emergency lights. She never saw the car coming, she said.

But police officers and representatives of the city attorney’s office argued that the chase, if it ever began, had ended long before Tartakoff’s car was struck. Therefore, they contended, the police officers had no obligation to warn other motorists away.

Jurors interviewed over the past several days said they agreed early in their deliberations last March that the police were negligent in their conduct during the incident. Most of their deliberations were spent trying to determine a fair amount for the award, they said.

“We did not believe the witnesses of the Police Department, so they buried themselves,” said Patrick F. Hoferer, 45, an electrician for Southern California Edison Co. Police officials denied that the officers were in pursuit, he said, but the jury made time and distance calculations and concluded that “they had to be in pursuit.”

Because the police did not turn on their lights or siren, “it was unanimous that they were guilty of not following their own procedures,” he said. “This definitely was not a sympathy thing.”

Peggy Willis, 58, a cost accountant for ITT Cannon, said a substantial number of jurors sided with the city, but were swayed toward Tartakoff because of the judge’s written instructions regarding negligence.

Tartakoff “had every right to at least have been warned that that police car was coming,” Willis said. “They in no way warned anybody on the ground that there was anything going on.”

Tartakoff might not have entered the intersection if she had heard a siren or seen a light, Willis added.

The juror said she was surprised and bitter that the judge threw out the jury’s work.

“I think this is totally unfair to Susan,” she said. “Why do they even bother to pick a jury and go to all this taxpayer expense? Why don’t they just have a judge?”

In his ruling in May, Breckenridge said that the police did not cause the accident and that “there was nothing that the police could have done reasonably to prevent (the driver) from doing what he did.”

The judge added that he saw “no competent evidence” that the police were chasing the car at excessive speed. Further, he said, the police had no legal duty to warn Tartakoff of the approaching car.

“The court does not believe that the police have a duty to use sirens to warn third parties whenever they are simply following a fleeing and recklessly driving criminal,” he said.

Breckenridge added that he is not “insensitive” to the plight of Susan Tartakoff and her husband and added that he does not “lightly set aside the verdicts returned by conscientious jurors.”

Tartakoff’s lawyer, Timothy J. Wheeler, has filed an appeal of the judge’s ruling.

The driver of the car that struck her, Douglas Gray of Panorama City, was convicted in 1986 of driving under the influence of drugs, as well as other charges stemming from the incident, and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Gray had almost no insurance and Tartakoff has collected nothing from him. She is nearing the limit of her own $1-million health insurance policy, she said.

Tartakoff, who was 36 at the time of the accident, has not been able to return to her job as a computer programmer at Universal Studios. She has spent the years since the crash in extensive physical therapy, and now has medical bills of about $5,000 a month. She remains in substantial pain, she said Tuesday, and her bowels and bladder do not function normally.

“I thought when the verdict came through that at least I’d be able to continue therapies and take advantage of anything new that comes along,” she said. “Now I don’t know what I’m going to do.”