The City of Los Angeles will step up to provide $40,000 to shooting victims Margie Carranza and Emma Hernandez after the Los Angeles Police Department failed to follow through on their promise to replace a truck they had destroyed.
LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and Glen Jonas, the victims' lawyer, announced the decision in a joint press conference Thursday afternoon.
"These ladies were left in a vulnerable position as a result of Christopher Dorner and the city's involvement in his apprehension," said Trutanich in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "It was the right thing to do -- it made good legal sense and it made good moral sense."
The settlement, which will cover the vehicle replacement and attorney's fees, only deals with property damage, not personal injury. Trutanich explained that bifurcating the case will allow both sides to focus on the more complicated parts of Carranza and Hernandez's case against the city.
"What we did today was work on the narrow, small end of the funnel," said Trutanich. "We got rid of the small portion of the case, making it a lot easier to focus on the larger case" -- the personal injury aspect.
Trutanich also praised his legal adversary, calling him a "reasonable man" for giving up his attorney's fees on the property damage settlement, which allowed the city of LA to settle quickly with Carranza and Hernandez over the vehicle replacement.
"There's still a lot of work to be done on this case," warned Trutanich. "But because we have a groundwork of cooperation and communication, we both know we can deal with each other in good faith."
LAPD officers pumped over 100 bullets into Carranza and Hernandez's pickup truck during the early hours of Feb. 7 during the frenzied hunt for Dorner. LAPD police had mistakenly identified the two women, delivering newspapers in a Torrance, Calif. neighborhood, as the fugitive despite the fact that they were driving a different color and model of truck than Dorner's getaway vehicle.
Carranza, 47, suffered injuries from broken glass, while her mother Hernandez, 71, took two bullets in the back. Two days after surviving the shooting, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck publicly promised to replace the women's truck -- but more than a month later, the vehicle still hadn't materialized, reports the Times.
At the heart of the conflict over the donated truck was the fact that Carranza and Hernandez would have had to claim the vehicle on an income tax form, which meant they would have had to pay taxes on the truck. Neither the private business donating the truck, nor the LAPD, wanted to pay the income tax for the victims.
Jonas told HuffPost Tuesday that he still plans on filing a government claim, which a precursor to a lawsuit, on behalf of his clients against the LAPD over the shooting incident.
This story has been updated with quotes from City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and more details about the settlement.
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