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Verdicts and Settlements

$10.6 Million Settlement - Wrongful Death

by Michael Taylor

Attorneys agreed yesterday to a $10.6 million settlement of a lawsuit over a car crash in which a 4-year-old girl died while her seriously injured mother lay helplessly pinned in the same car, trying to calm her dying daughter.

The settlement award went to Judy and Joe Smith, a Hayward couple whose daughter Sencera was killed in September 1985, when a Chevrolet Blazer driven by Kent Haskovec blew one of its huge, over-sized tires and crashed into the Smiths' Ford Pinto, demolishing it.

According to Berkeley attorney Luke Ellis, who represented the Smith family, the three-foot-tall tire was mislabeled and "could not be used on any vehicle without first making dangerous modifications - raising the car's center of gravity about 30 percent, rendering the car highly unstable."

Ellis reached the settlement with Denman Tire Corp., of Warren, Ohio, the firm that made the tire; Tire and Battery Corp., of Memphis, Tenn.; and Grand Auto, the auto supply chain that sold it.

Hugh Doucette, assistant to Denman's president, defended the company's product and said "it's one of the best on the market. And it's safe, if not misused."

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Hodge, who oversaw the settlement, said that "what made this case unusual is that the parent was confined in the car while the child was dying, and experienced the agonies that the child experienced."

Ellis said the accident happened when the two vehicles were each traveling at about 40 miles per hour on Mission Boulevard in Hayward.

The Blazer began to shimmy and then its left-front tire blew out. Haskovec lost control and collided head-on with the Smith car, the lawyer said.

Judy Smith was knocked unconscious. When she came around, she said later in a deposition, "it was dark and I was calling for Sencera to answer me, and I was telling her that it was OK, that I was there, for her not to be afraid, and that I was calling out to her: 'Sencera, please answer me. Sencera, this is Mom. This is Mommy. Please answer. And... she wouldn't answer me. I reached out with my hand, as much as I could, and it was so dark I couldn't find her."

The girl was crushed when the Blazer hit her mother's car and she died two days later.