Metro is being sued for wrongful death and negligence by the three children of a 67-year-old woman who was stabbed to death on a Metro train in Universal City in 2024.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, comes just over a month after Mirna Soza Arauz’s killer, 47-year-old Elliott Tramel Nowden, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The criminal case trial, which also took place in Los Angeles Superior Court, ended with a jury convicting Nowden of murder with the special circumstance that it occurred during the commission of a robbery, along with allegations that he personally used a knife and that the victim was robbed while she was a passenger aboard the train.
The victim’s son, Jose Roman Soza, and sisters, Mirna Jose Leon Roman and Nadia Valeska Cisne Soza, gave victim-impact statements at Nowden’s sentencing. They are now plaintiffs in the lawsuit and allege that Metro management was well aware of a lack of security measures given the numerous other assaults on Metro train patrons.
“Plaintiffs bring this action seeking damages and judicial intervention to rectify the tragedy to which their family has been subjected and, hopefully prevent further incidents like this to occur…,” the suit states.
A Metro spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Arauz suffered “excruciating pain and grievous injuries” from the April 22, 2024, attack at about 5 a.m. at the Universal City station and clung to life for a period of time, but died later that morning, the suit states.
Metro’s alleged failure to implement and maintain reasonable security and safety measures to address known criminal activity occurring on and around the Metro system, including foreseeable violent criminal assaults against riders on trains and at stations, left passengers exposed to an unreasonable risk of attack, the suit alleges.
Reasonable security staffing, monitoring, safety procedures, enforcement of rules and other corrective measures could have made a difference that morning, according to the complaint, which seeks unspecified damages and additionally states that Nowden never even paid his fare before boarding the Metro B Line train, formerly known as the Red Line.
In his sentencing memorandum, Deputy District Attorney Alexander Bott wrote that the defendant “armed himself with two knives and used them to repeatedly stab a 67-year-old victim who was seated, unsuspecting and unable to defend herself” in an attack that was “swift, deliberate and unprovoked.”
The prosecutor told jurors in his closing argument that the victim was simply trying to get home after work when “the defendant butchered her” by attacking her with two knives — one in each of his hands — in a crime caught on surveillance video.