“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.”<\/p>\n
The fire department and the city attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
According to a transcript of an interview from the scene, LAFD Apparatus Operator\u00a0Vincent Leong\u00a0said the truck stopped at the intersection and made sure nobody was approaching before proceeding.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
The amount the city pays each year in settlements and jury verdicts has skyrocketed, from $64 million about a decade ago to $289 million\u00a0last year.<\/a><\/p>\n In 2025, a jury\u00a0awarded<\/a>\u00a0nearly $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\u00a0motorcyclist<\/a>\u00a0received $11 million after he was hit by a\u00a0Los Angeles Department of Water and Power\u00a0driver.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Feldstein Soto failed to advance out of the June primary, the first time an incumbent\u00a0Los Angeles\u00a0city attorney had been ousted before a general election in\u00a0nearly 100 years.<\/a><\/p>\n Feldstein Soto has argued the city’s payouts were inflated by\u00a0a “cascade of horrible” cases<\/a>\u00a0that were pending when she took office.<\/p>\n “I’ve protected the city at every turn,” she said earlier this year.<\/p>\n Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the\u00a0California Department of Justice, is competing for the job with\u00a0Los Angeles County\u00a0prosecutor\u00a0John McKinney\u00a0in the November election.<\/p>\n This story originally appeared in\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a92026 Los Angeles Times. Visit\u00a0latimes.com<\/a>. Distributed by\u00a0Tribune Content Agency, LLC.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“If you sat through our trial, you’d be like, ‘These guys are high,’” said Marchino. “They kept saying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-440736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}