A security guard killed in a freak accident near the set of “NCIS” in Santa Clarita three years ago survived a civil war in his native El Salvador, adapted as a child to the loss of an eye and accepted menial work in the U.S. despite a solid education, his family’s attorney told a jury Thursday.
Julio Villamariona was struck by a production van driven by a CBS Corp. employee on Feb. 9, 2011. In his opening statement to a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, plaintiffs’ lawyer Brian Panish said Villamariona never let pride overcome his good judgment.
“He had to overcome some tremendous hurdles in life,” Panish said. “He never felt sorry for himself and he always had a positive attitude.”
In his opening statement, CBS attorney Dana Alden Fox said he and Panish agree on most issues in the case, including that van driver Ralph Blunt was negligent. The network has agreed to pay $450,000 in lost income to the plaintiffs and Fox said they also are entitled to additional “loss of relationship” damages for weathering the loss of the family patriarch.
“There is no dispute that this family experienced a significant and tragic loss,” Fox said.
Fox said the only issue is what is a fair and reasonable amount of non- economic damages to award the plaintiffs.
Villamariona, 52, of Reseda was in a “base camp” parking lot for the television show when he was hit by the 15-passenger 2006 Ford E-350 van driven by Blunt, who was shuttling actors and crew members from the parking lot to the “NCIS” set, according to the CBS attorneys’ court papers.
Blunt, then 60, passed out and lost control of the vehicle, according to the CBS attorneys. The van hit Villamariona, a tree and finally two parked cars at the bottom of an embankment.
Villamariona died in an ambulance en route to a hospital. Blunt was hospitalized following the accident.
Villamariona’s widow, 55-year-old Zoila Villamariona, and three children — Marcela Villamariona, 33, Ivania Villamariona, 27, and 29-year-old Yasmara Garcia — sued CBS and Blunt in Los Angeles Superior Court in July 2012.
Panish showed jurors more than two dozen photos of Villamariona, many of them taken when he was a child and a young man in El Salvador. One of the photos depicted Villamariona with a bandage over his left eye after it was removed because of a tumor when he was about 4 years old.
Villamariona was raised by relatives because his mother was 16 years old when he was born and was unable to take care of him, according to Panish.
The lawyer said Villamariona completed high school with good grades and went to college. He and his wife married in 1980, a time when turmoil was the rampant in their homeland due to a civil war between the military government and rebel fighters, Panish said.
“Life in El Salvador during this time was not easy,” he said. “It was not a safe place; there was a lot of violence and crime.”
Despite the obstacles, Villamariona later became head of a Salvadoran financial institution, Credomatic, Panish said. The family also had a restaurant, and Villamariona was a member of a band that performed cumbia, salsa and merengue music, Panish said.
But the country’s economy eventually soured and the family decided it was time to move to the U.S., Panish said.
For a time, Zoila Villamariona and her daughter Ivania lived in Atlanta and the rest of the family in Reseda until they were able to reunite in the Southland after one or two years, Panish said.
Villamariona’s first job in the U.S. involved packing boxes, and he took three buses to get to work, Panish said.
Villamariona accepted his daughter Marcela’s gay lifestyle and also provided leadership and support to his other offspring, Panish said. He celebrated holidays with a vigor, loved to cook and encouraged people at family gatherings to dance, Panish said.
“He was not only the head of his family, but also the heart and soul of his family,” Panish said.
Panish said the trial will be short, but jurors will hear a lot in that time.
“The evidence is going to be powerful and it’s going to resonate,” Panish said.
Marcela Villamariona, the first of her father’s daughters to testify, wept uncontrollably at times. She narrated family videos shown to jurors and told them that her father did not criticize her for her sexual orientation.
“It made me so happy that he accepted who I was,” she said.
She said it was difficult for gays in El Salvador because of the influence of the Catholic Church. Many were killed or tortured during the civil war, she said.
She said her father’s influence on her was especially helpful while she went through a difficult stage of her life after first arriving in the U.S. She said she shuttled back and forth between Reseda and El Salvador while dealing with personal issues she did not specify to jurors.
She said her behavior in 2000 prompted a letter from her father, who she called “my guide,” in which he told her he was concerned “you’re wasting your life away when you have opportunities here in the U.S.”
“It made me change the way I thought,” she said of the correspondence. “I was doing something wrong at the time.”
Villamariona considered his wife his queen and his daughters his princesses, she said.
Garcia, the second Villamariona daughter to take the stand, was more composed as she smiled and described her relationship with her father.
“I was the favored one,” she said. “I was daddy’s girl.”
She said that although her father was always busy, he found time when he came home to be with his girls.
— City News Service