Trial Structure’s Alejandro Blanco and Ilya Lerma consulted on this case where the last pre-trial offer from the Defense was for the Plaintiff to pay $250,000.
A San Luis Obispo County jury awarded more than $20 million to an injured woman and the families of a man killed in a 2016 attack by a retired police dog in Grover Beach.
Original Article: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article252908423.html#storylink=cpy
The jury on Thursday found that a Tulare County police department did not properly train one of its officers how to safely secure his retired police dog, leading to the deadly mauling five years ago.
The city of Exeter, its former police chief and a K-9 supervisor will be on the hook for the majority of a total $20.8 million in damages to Betty Long, 90, and the family of David Fear, who died shortly after the dog attack in December 2016.
The jury was unanimous in nearly all of its findings that Exeter’s police department, specifically former police Chief Clifton Bush and police Lt. Brett Inglehart, were negligent in how they trained former officer Alex Geiger to care for his retired police K-9, a Belgian Malinois named Neo.
Geiger, who previously settled for an undisclosed amount, was also found to share some responsibility for the attack.
The jury took nearly two days to reach the verdicts following a nearly monthlong trial, the first civil trial to take place in San Luis Obispo Superior Court since COVID-19 safety measures limited in-person court proceedings.Calling the dog a “dangerous weapon,” Long’s legal team, Jacqueline Frederick and Sunny Hawks, successfully argued during trial that the city of Exeter and members of its Police Department cut corners in educating Geiger on how to safely maintain the animal, which was not meant to be treated like a pet and was supposed to be kenneled anytime Geiger wasn’t around.
They showed through testimony that Exeter K-9 officers had a culture of treating their dogs as normal pets, which Geiger testified to during the trial.
Neo and a second dog were not kenneled in Geiger’s yard while he was on duty on the day of the attack, and they escaped by breaking through a fence.
Jurors also heard testimony from a retired Los Angeles Police Department K-9 unit supervisor that Geiger’s superiors in Exeter didn’t make clear to him the “serious commitment” and strict rules related to keeping a retired police dog.
Though the city of Grover Beach was initially named as a defendant, it was dropped from the lawsuit in the years leading up to the trial.
FAMILY OF VICTIMS GIVE AN EMOTIONAL THANK YOU TO THE JURY
Before releasing the jury Thursday, Superior Court Judge Barry LaBarbera told them that the matter was “an important case for the community.”
Following the verdicts, many jurors stopped to hug, shake hands with, and cry with Long and members of Fear’s family, each of whom emphatically thanked them for their service.
“Thank you so very much,” a tearful Long, who is wheelchair bound, told one juror as she received a hug.
“It was an honor to be here,” one juror told Fear’s family members. “The hardest part was not being able to talk to you (during the trial).”
Outside the courtroom, several jurors hung around to talk about the case with Hawks and Frederick, who told The Tribune that justice had been served.
“The quality of (Long’s) life has been taken from her due to the negligence of the city of Exeter and the choices that they made,” Frederick said. “I am so grateful and relieved that the jury, who spent three weeks listening to the evidence, listening to the testimony, that they got it and understood that the choices they made caused a man to lose his life, and another sweet, adorable lady to go through one of the most horrible experiences you could ever imagine.”
She said she hopes the verdict “will be a message about the seriousness of trained K-9s, because they are valuable tools in law enforcement, but they’re a dangerous weapon that can act on (their own) as we talked about (during trial).
“It is unfortunate that there are officers that, because they bond with the dog, they forget that the dog is a dangerous weapon first and foremost. So I hope that this verdict helps make some changes,” Frederick added. “There are no written policies about how to handle a trained K-9 in retirement, and there should be. And it should be uniform across the state.”
Chester Walls, an attorney for Exeter, had argued during the trial that Geiger signed a purchasing agreement relieving the city of liability when he personally bought the dog prior to his move to Grover Beach, which does not have a K-9 unit.
Walls unsuccessfully countered that a former owner of a dog is not liable for a current owner’s conduct.
He attended Thursday’s court hearing via Zoom conference and was not immediately available for comment.
HOW THE JURY ASSESSED LIABILITY AND DAMAGES
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, including John Denove, who represented Fear’s family, had sought $7 million in damages related to Fear’s death and $13.8 million in damages to Long, who is being taken care of by her family members.
In reaching a verdict, the jury of seven women and five men unanimously found that Bush and Inglehart were negligent in failing to warn Geiger how to properly care for Neo, including telling Geiger that the animal was not a pet, could not be untrained from its tactical training, and had that it must be kenneled when Geiger was not present.
Long suffered a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, a shattered shoulder and dog bites to her torso. Some of Long’s injuries, including her shoulder, persist, and she’s since suffered a stroke that an expert witness testified was attributed to the attack, Frederick said.
The jury found that Long was due $1.3 million for future economic losses in medical and other bills, as well as $12.5 million in non-economic damages including pain and suffering, and emotional trauma.
The full $7 million was awarded to Fear’s family members for non-economic damages from the lost support and companionship of Fear, as well as emotional trauma and suffering.
The jury was unanimous in almost all of their verdicts — including finding that Bush, Inglehart and Geiger were at fault for the mauling — but disagreed on the percentage of each defendant’s liability.
In a 9-3 vote, the jurors found Inglehart 42% liable for Fear’s death, Bush 41.5%, and Geiger 16.5%. All 12 jurors held Long, Geiger’s property management company and landlords 0% percent responsible.
The verdicts only required a simple majority of jurors in the civil case.
JURY ACQUITTED FORMER POLICE OFFICER IN CRIMINAL TRIAL
Long, then 86, was walking her small dog outside her home in the 1100 block of Nacimiento Avenue on Dec. 13, 2016, when Fear, her next-door neighbor, greeted them outside.
When Fear bent down to pick up her dog, Long said Geiger’s Belgian Malinois, Neo, appeared out of nowhere and attacked her and Fear.
Fear suffered severe lacerations and bite wounds to his arms. He died three days later from complications of his injuries at age 64.
Court testimony from the criminal case revealed that Neo and a female German shepherd also owned by Geiger broke through a fence while Geiger was on duty. They had escaped their enclosures earlier in the day and chased a mailman, who escaped unharmed, and Geiger had previously returned to his home that day to secure his fence.
Neighbors interviewed by law enforcement described the dogs as a problem in the neighborhood.
Geiger resigned from the Grover Beach Police Department roughly two months after the incident.
Neo was euthanized. The German shepherd — which was not a trained police dog — was not believed to be directly involved in the attack and was moved to a safe location.
The San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office in June 2017 charged Geiger, who as of a few years ago worked as a general contractor, with two felony counts of failing to maintain the dangerous animals and a felony charge of manslaughter.
Geiger, now 29, faced up to almost four years in state prison if he was convicted and would never again have be allowed to work as a police officer.
While the prosecution alleged that Geiger was negligent in how he kept his Belgian Malinois and a German Shepherd at home while he was away, essentially allowing them to escape their enclosure and attack the neighbors, the defense argued that there is no standard for how owners are to keep their retired police K-9s.
The criminal trial against Geiger lasted about a month in April 2019 before the jury returned not guilty verdicts on all three counts after three hours of deliberations.