Saturday, March 21, 2009

Failure To Call 911 Brings $10M Verdict

By Scott Sandlin Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal Journal Staff Writer Peter Lopez was a 22-year-old who was going places on the night in 2003 that forever changed his life. He was quickly promoted at every job he'd had and had purchased a home. When the night was over, Lopez had been stabbed with an ice pick and his neck stomped on, leaving him a quadriplegic, after a brawl that a security guard watched without interfering or calling 911. This week, a state District Court jury awarded $10.2 million in damages against Prestige Security Inc., the company hired for the event Lopez had just left at the Albuquerque Convention Center. The verdict includes $2 million in punitive damages. Lopez will receive a total of about $7.4 million. On Nov. 1, 2003, Lopez - who at the time was a slot supervisor at Santa Ana Star Casino - and a group of his friends were leaving a commercially produced Halloween party at the Convention Center when a man none of them knew, later identified as Dominic Anaya, approached one of Lopez's friends and "started getting in his face" - and then called over a group of his friends. Details of what happened next are imprecise, but the outcome is not, says Alexander Crecca, one of the attorneys representing Lopez. In the fighting that erupted, Lopez, who had jumped in a car brought around by one of his friends, realized one of the friends was missing and saw him being straddled by a guy who was beating him. "Peter does what I think is the heroic thing," Crecca said. Lopez got out of the car to help his friend, then felt a hard blow to his back. That's the last thing he remembered, Crecca said. At the start of the fighting, Crecca said, Lopez's then-girlfriend ran to the nearby locked doors of the Convention Center and screamed: "Do something! Do something!" to a convention guard, who told her the company was responsible only for security inside the building. "Call 911!" the girlfriend told the guard. Crecca said that, during the 20 to 30 minutes the fighting escalated outside the doors of the Convention Center, none of the security personnel called 911. He said a hot dog vendor there that night testified at trial, saying the vendor said: "Ray Charles could've seen it happening." People fleeing the chaos flagged down an off-duty police officer a few blocks away at Second and Copper NW. The officer's arrival dispersed the crowd, which the police report estimated at 250. "I think jurors were shocked and appalled by this and wanted to send a message that, if you see something like this, report it to police," Crecca said. Prestige's local attorney, Briggs Cheney, couldn't be reached for comment. The trial before Judge Valerie Huling lasted two weeks. The jury found Prestige negligent, and that the negligence caused Lopez's injuries. Under New Mexico's comparative negligence standard, the jury assigned 60 percent fault to Prestige and 10 percent each to the city of Albuquerque/Convention Center, the unknown assailant who stabbed Lopez, Dominic Anaya and Lopez himself. That means the now-defunct security firm is responsible for paying Lopez $5.4 million in compensatory damages, plus the $2 million in punitive damages. Crecca said Lopez had previously settled with other defendants, including the city. "The jury found it was the security company's job to observe and report," Crecca said, "and if they'd done it at the beginning, a former Convention Center director said police usually got there very quickly." Lopez spent 11 days at University of New Mexico Hospital and six weeks at a rehabilitation center. Now 28, he lives in his home, where his friend Andres Fierro, Fierro's fiancee and Lopez's mother help care for him. With considerable effort, he has been able to gain some movement in his right arm. "He's a very special person," Crecca said. "It's been a long, hard road. He was a real go-getter before he got hurt." Lopez takes classes, many of them via the Internet, at Central New Mexico Community College and expects to complete an associate's degree this semester. Then, Crecca said, he hopes to go to business school at UNM. "This was a tragedy that could have been so easily avoided if the security company had done the ethical and moral thing," Crecca said.

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Scott Sandlin Click here to view more articles by Ilona Chappelle.