At the parties request and to facilitate a possible settlement, a judge has delayed until early 2024 all future hearings in a lawsuit brought by the family of a 3-year-old boy who allegedly contracted lead poisoning at a rental property owned by Southwestern Law School.
The hearings pushed back include one requested by Carina Castaneda and her relatives to have an expedited trial in the case. Originally scheduled for hearing on Wednesday, on Tuesday the matter was reset for Jan. 10 by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Maurice A. Leiter.
On Saturday, a mediator presented a settlement proposal and both sides have until Dec. 22 to take it or leave it, according to a sworn declaration by plaintiffs’ attorney Grant K. Riley.
“In the interim, the parties have agreed to stand down and suspend all litigation efforts to give the parties time to review and either accept or reject the proposal,” Riley says.
The possible settlement announcement comes not long after school attorneys filed court papers stating that granting an expedited trial to the plaintiffs would jeopardize their ability to prepare a defense and potentially expose the institution to bankruptcy.
Carina Castaneda is the lead plaintiff in the case along with her afflicted son, Isaias, second son, 1-year-old Iyse Melendez, and mother, Maria Jesus Salazar Garcia, 73. The other defendants are Charles Dunn Real Estate Services Inc. and Beach Front Property Management Inc.
The suit alleges that Southwestern failed to properly own, operate and manage their former apartment on Shatto Place in Koreatown. The plaintiffs’ attorneys previously filed court papers with Judge Maurice Leiter asking that a trial be scheduled within 120 days of the hearing on the accelerated trial motion, noting that both children are under age 14.
However, school attorneys filed their own court papers arguing that granting the motion would violate the school’s constitutional rights.
“The school is a non-profit educational institution and plaintiffs are seeking in excess of $25 million in damages,” the Southwestern lawyers state in their court papers. “If a jury were to award plaintiffs even a fraction of that, the school would go bankrupt. Such consequential litigation cannot be rushed without serious harm to the school.”
Multiple school attorneys and paralegals from two law firms are presently reviewing about 100,000 documents, according to the school lawyers’ court papers, which further state that the school has identified a second set of documents that pre-date 2004 and relate to the apartment complex totaling more than one million pages.
According to the suit, during the time the family lived at the apartment, it had dangerous levels of peeling and deteriorated lead-based paint and was infested by cockroaches, which along with other allegedly substandard conditions have caused the plaintiffs significant bodily injuries, emotional distress and property damage.
The lead-based paint in the Castaneda family’s apartment “poisoned young Isaias,” the family’s lawyers further maintain.
In addition, on June 30, urban entomology expert Josh Shoemaker inspected the plaintiffs’ apartment and documented an ongoing moderate cockroach infestation, noting that the accumulation of German cockroach fecal material throughout the unit evidences a long term problem and/or a past severe infestation,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys state in their court papers, adding, “Mr. Shoemaker concluded that the longstanding cockroach infestation in the apartment constitutes a health hazard for plaintiffs.”