The city of Los Angeles received a $15 million wrongful death lawsuit brought by the mother of a 35-year-old man who was fatally hit by an LA Sanitation truck; it was the second fatal accident involving a Los Angeles garbage truck in two months.
On Jan. 25, according to the LAPD, the city truck was backing into an alley behind Burbank Boulevard and Noble Avenue in Sherman Oaks, emptying residential trash cans, when it struck and killed 35-year-old David Soto-Toral. .
“Mr. Soto-Toral was sitting in the middle of the aisle when he was beaten and killed… (he) died of a closed head injury immediately after being struck,” said attorney Robert Brennan in the name of Sara Toral, David’s mother.
“He was a young man who touched many lives in a very positive way. He had a huge circle of friends,” attorney Brennan told our sister network, NBC4.
“The day he died, a part of me died. I can’t explain the pain,” Sara Toral told the I-Team after the January crash.
She says her son was a successful skateboarder that he landed endorsements and built a career in the entertainment industry.
But she said he struggled with addiction, which began after a series of skateboarding accidents in which he was prescribed opioid painkillers.
Peter Chadwick was a fugitive in Mexico for several years after murdering and dumping his wife’s body in a Southern California landfill.
“It seemed like every time he went on his addiction ‘trips,’ he didn’t want to be with his family, so he just disappeared,” Toral said.
And that’s what seemed to happen around January 25, when a surveillance camera spotted him, looking tall, sitting on a sidewalk on Burbank Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.
Hours later, at around 11:20 a.m., he was seen sitting in a nearby alley, minutes before Los Angeles police said a city garbage truck backed into the empty cans and hit David Soto Toral.
The LAPD told NBC4’s I-Team that the driver was not disabled, but Toral’s attorney Robert Brennan points out that there were five cameras on the garbage truck to guide the driver.
“He has 360 cameras on this truck. Whatever caused this crash, he wasn’t paying attention to what he was seeing immediately,” Brennan told NBC4.
Brennan’s lawsuit for Sara Toral asks the city of Los Angeles for $15 million for “pain and suffering.”
“We don’t think $15 million is out of reach for long,” Brennan said.
“What is the value of a human life? This man was a very important part of many communities, the entertainment community, the skating community,” Brennan added.
Sara Toral wants to have some sort of permanent memorial for her son. A mural painted on a wall in the alley where David was killed was demolished; Toral doesn’t know who kidnapped him.
So now he wants to use some of the money from the City of Los Angeles to make improvements to the Los Angeles skate parks that made his son so happy, and maybe build an indoor skate park.
“I would like to provide a safe haven for skaters, like an indoor skatepark that can be open 24 hours a day and maybe have a social worker there that they can talk to,” Toral told NBC4.
His attorney, Robert Brennan, expects it will take several months to get a response from the city of Los Angeles to the wrongful death lawsuit, and he expects the city to deny it. He says the Toral family will file a formal complaint against the city.
LA Sanitation told NBC4 it would not comment on ongoing litigation.