“If you sat through our trial, you’d be like, ‘These guys are high,'” said Marchino. “They kept saying ‘They stopped,’ and we had video saying they didn’t stop.”

The fire department and the city attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

According to a transcript of an interview from the scene, LAFD Apparatus Operator Vincent Leong said the truck stopped at the intersection and made sure nobody was approaching before proceeding.

“This is a blind intersection, you know, so I slowed down,” he said, according to the transcript, which was used as evidence at the trial. “I started creeping forward. … I didn’t see anybody.”

The amount the city pays each year in settlements and jury verdicts has skyrocketed, from $64 million about a decade ago to $289 million last year.

In 2025, a jury awarded nearly $49 million to a man in a coma after he was hit by a city garbage truck driver, who was accused of making an “unsafe right turn.” The year prior, a motorcyclist received $11 million after he was hit by a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power driver.

Hydee Feldstein Soto, who heads the city attorney’s office, has argued rising costs are the results of juries feeling increasingly antagonistic to local government. Some plaintiffs’ attorneys have countered that her leadership is to blame with too many cases with weak defenses brought to trial.

Feldstein Soto failed to advance out of the June primary, the first time an incumbent Los Angeles city attorney had been ousted before a general election in nearly 100 years.

Feldstein Soto has argued the city’s payouts were inflated by a “cascade of horrible” cases that were pending when she took office.

“I’ve protected the city at every turn,” she said earlier this year.

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, is competing for the job with Los Angeles County prosecutor John McKinney in the November election.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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