USC is asking a judge to bar the plaintiff’s attorneys in an upcoming trial of a lawsuit brought by the family of a cinematographer who was killed in an off-road crash in Imperial County from suggesting that Chinese students are less trustworthy or more unlikely to follow rules.
In January, Chatsworth Superior Court Judge Michael O’Gara ruled that the relatives of 29-year-old Peng “Aaron” Wang could proceed to trial against USC on a negligence claim while dismissing the second allegation against the university that would have held USC responsible for the alleged acts of its students.
The lawsuit was brought by Hualan Wang and Hua Sun, the father and mother, respectively, of the late Wang. The plaintiffs’ son was born at a time when China allowed each family only one child. Also named as defendants are the “Finale” film’s director, Ting Su, and producer, Biangliang Li, both of whom are USC students and Chinese nationals.
With trial set for June 22, USC lawyers have filed multiple pretrial motions, among them the one concerning the alleged assumption that USC should have supervised Chinese students differently from other students because Chinese students are known to be untrustworthy and/or likely to break USC’s safety rules.
USC lawyers state in their pleadings that such evidence and argument should be excluded because it is “thoroughly offensive and improperly discriminatory, in addition to being irrelevant and prejudicial.”
Yet, during pretrial depositions, the plaintiffs’ attorneys “repeatedly attempted to elicit testimony from USC-affiliated witnesses that Chinese students … were somehow less trustworthy than other students and more likely to break the rules,” according to the university lawyers’ court papers.
Therefore, the plaintiffs appear to contend that USC owed a greater duty to the general public to supervise Chinese students because they were known rule-breakers, the USC attorneys contend in their court pleadings.
“USC cannot treat its students differently based on race, ethnicity or country of origin,” the university lawyers further state in their pleadings, adding that doing so would be “contrary to the law as well as USC’s own policies of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Wang was a Chapman University film student recruited by the USC students to serve as their cameraman for “Finale,” a movie about the hallucinations and death of a man in the desert, the suit states. Filming took place in the Glamis Dunes, east of Brawley, and Wang died from injuries sustained when a Can-Am off-road vehicle, driven by Li, rolled down one of the dunes on April 15, 2022, the suit states.
Wang’s Imperial County death certificate, attached to the suit, states he died of blunt neck trauma.
“Asking film students to handle and oversee all of their own on-set safety without oversight is like asking an elephant to fly, according to USC’s own faculty,” the suit filed in September 2022 states.
USC had the responsibility and ability to exercise control over its students and its school film projects, according to the suit. However, the university was “negligent in the exercise of that control on the `Finale’ production” instead of fulfilling its obligation to protect Wang from harm, the suit further contends.
USC actively recruits Chinese students such as Li and Su to enroll in its film school, yet fails to teach them to identify and react to the inherent dangers of filmmaking, the suit alleges.