Garo
Mardirossian

The crosswalk was faded and did not line up with the sidewalk, so a bicyclist who followed it was pushed toward the traffic lane, and the lane itself narrowed from fourteen feet to ten and a half beside the crosswalk, leaving a ten-foot bus, mirrors included, almost no clearance. Footage from three cameras and the experts' testimony put the two girls in the driver's view about 300 feet out, ten seconds before impact, and fully in view at forty-three feet, and the driver testified at deposition that he had never been trained on Vehicle Code section 21760, which requires three feet of clearance when passing a bicyclist. Mardirossian told the jury the driver's inattention was "unforgivable." MV Transportation's highest offer had been $4.9 million. After nine days of trial, on November 10, 2021, the jury returned $21.6 million and assigned seventy-five percent of the fault to MV, fifteen to the city and ten to Caltrans; the city and the state had each settled earlier for $4.9 million, and the recovery, with interest and costs, was reported at $32.1 million. The model, Mardirossian said afterward, had played a "significant role in the factfinder's ability to appreciate the different moving parts."

Fairfax Boulevard

Mardirossian was born in Aleppo in 1956 to an Armenian family that settled in Los Angeles, where his father ran a service station on Fairfax Boulevard. He worked there through high school and college as a mechanic and became a certified State of California smog inspector. He studied economics at UCLA, took his law degree at Whittier College School of Law, and in 1981 opened the Law Offices of Garo Mardirossian, taking injury cases before the docket turned to defective vehicles, dangerous roads and the conduct of police.

A Set of BMW Wheels

Hot tar from a roofer's repair seeped through the ceiling of a restaurant kitchen in a Total Investment Company mini-mall and burned the operator's left arm, and the jury put ninety-five percent of the fault on the roofer and five percent on the landlord. In Srithong v. Total Investment Co., decided in 1994, Presiding Justice Joan Dempsey Klein wrote that "Proposition 51 did not abrogate vicarious tort liability of persons for the acts of others which is not based on principles of comparative fault," and the court modified the judgment to hold landlord and roofer jointly liable for the whole award.

In June 1992 two teenagers, Oganes Saakyan and Garnik Paronyan, bought BMW wheels from Modern Auto and had them put on Saakyan's 1986 Honda Accord; on the 605 Freeway soon afterward the car veered out of control, and Saakyan's spinal cord was irreversibly damaged. A first jury found for Modern Auto in 1995, and the trial court vacated the verdict for juror misconduct. The second jury found the shop negligent and awarded Saakyan $12,233,744 and Paronyan $566,928.32. On October 31, 2002, Justice Richard Aldrich affirmed the judgment and held, for the plaintiffs' February 1994 settlement offers, that "a statutory offer to compromise under section 998 is not extinguished by a judgment that is vacated by a subsequent order for a new trial."

A Courtroom Like an Auto Shop

On May 24, 1997, Agop and Catherine Gozukara were driving home on Interstate 15 near Barstow in a used 1994 Ford Explorer they had bought from Joe MacPherson Ford in Tustin a few months earlier, Catherine pregnant and three boys aboard. They had taken the truck back to the dealership repeatedly for a front-end vibration that was never fixed. When a big rig swerved into their lane Agop braked hard, the front end shook violently, and the Explorer struck a Caltrans K-rail, rode a hundred feet along the top of it, crossed into oncoming traffic and rolled. Agop's legs were fractured; Catherine's spine was fractured, she was paralyzed, and she lost the pregnancy. Mardirossian tried Catherine's case with Charles B. O'Reilly in San Bernardino County before Judge John P. Vander Feer, over four months and 527 exhibits. "My courtroom was filled with electronic media, wires, and vehicle parts," the judge said. "It began to look and smell like a high-tech auto shop." The jury found the Explorer defectively designed; Caltrans had settled for $5.5 million over the barrier, the dealership paid $9.4 million, and the family, who refused a confidentiality clause, recovered $14.9 million.

Pannu v. Land Rover was tried to the bench. On December 14, 2003, Sukhsagar Pannu, forty-seven, was driving his 1998 Land Rover Discovery west on the 118 Freeway near Simi Valley at about sixty-five miles an hour when an Acura struck him from behind; the Discovery hit a Chevrolet Blazer and rolled several times, and the dislocation of his sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae left him a quadriplegic. Mardirossian and Armen Akaragian built the record on the vehicle's stability and roof: a track an inch and a half wider, a center of gravity 0.44 inch lower on low-profile tires, and about 109 pounds of roof reinforcement costing $116 would have changed the outcome, against marketing that sold a "steel inner body cage" and a "steel roof panel." Judge Robert H. O'Brien of the Los Angeles Superior Court found the Discovery defective under both the consumer-expectation and the risk-benefit tests, found a failure to warn, apportioned ninety-five percent of the fault to Land Rover and awarded $21,654,000. On January 19, 2011, Presiding Justice Dennis Perluss affirmed in a published opinion. The Discovery, Mardirossian said, was "sold like a fortress, but really, it was a matchbox." A jury's $3.15 million verdict over a defective Nissan seat belt belongs to the same docket.

A Bridal Shower in Cerritos

On February 11, 1989, the Dole family, Samoan-Americans, held a bridal shower in Cerritos for Melinda Dole Paopao. Sheriff's deputies arrived on a report of guests fighting with sticks and knives; twenty-five of them, in riot gear, kicked in the door. David Dole's hand was broken and he suffered brain damage from batons and flashlights; Orlanda Dole was beaten unconscious; among the others hurt were the professional wrestler Emily "Mount Fiji" Dole, the chief Fea Talamaivao, a pregnant woman and elderly guests. Thirty-six people were arrested and eight charged; three were acquitted and the charges against the rest were dismissed. A neighbor had recorded the whole thing, and the tape showed none of the rocks and bottles the deputies described.

Mardirossian represented thirty-five of the thirty-six plaintiffs in Dole v. County of Los Angeles, which went to a jury for twenty-nine weeks in 1995 on claims of false arrest, excessive force, false reports and malicious prosecution. The jury awarded $15.9 million. In May 1998 the Second District affirmed, by then $23 million with fees and interest; the Supreme Court denied review, and the county paid $24.85 million. "We are very, very happy and relieved," he said of the affirmance.

Nine Minutes and Forty Seconds

Kelly Thomas, thirty-seven, homeless and diagnosed with schizophrenia, was beaten by six Fullerton officers at the Fullerton Transportation Center on July 5, 2011, tasered six times over nine minutes and forty seconds while he cried that he could not breathe; he died five days later. Surveillance footage recorded the beating, and the officers wrote their reports after viewing it. Mardirossian represented Thomas's father, Ron Thomas; the city's first offer was $900,000, and on the eve of trial in November 2015 it paid $4.9 million. "The act of having agreed to pay that large amount is a tacit admission," he said.

On August 1, 2014, sheriff's deputies hunting an armed parolee, Cedric Ramirez, entered Frank Mendoza's house on Rosehedge Drive in Pico Rivera, found him inside with his wife, Lorraine Munoz, and two children, and left without telling the family how to get out; Ramirez forced his way in and took Munoz hostage, and when Mendoza, fifty-four, tried to leave through his own front door a deputy shot him in the head and the leg. On October 16, 2018, the Board of Supervisors approved a $14.35 million settlement with the family.

On July 2, 2016, Anaheim officers Woojin Jun and Daniel Wolfe answered a call about a suspicious person near a laundromat, put Fermin Vincent Valenzuela II in a choke hold and tased him repeatedly across several blocks while a sergeant told them to "hold that choke"; he died eight days later, and the medical examiner called it a homicide by asphyxiation. Mardirossian and Lawrence D. Marks tried the family's case with Dale K. Galipo, and the federal jury awarded $13.2 million, including $3.6 million for the loss of Valenzuela's own life. On August 3, 2021, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge John B. Owens, held that Section 1983 permits loss-of-life damages whatever California's survival statute says, since the contrary rule "would incentivize officers to aim to kill a suspect, rather than just harm him," and affirmed. Douglas Zerby, thirty-five, was sitting on a friend's steps in Belmont Shore on December 12, 2010, holding a pistol-grip garden-hose nozzle, when two Long Beach officers, who had watched him for eight minutes from concealment after a neighbor reported a gun, shot him without announcing themselves; a federal jury in Santa Ana awarded his son, his mother and his father $6.5 million in 2013, with $5,000 in punitive damages against each officer, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2016. On October 15, 2015, a sheriff's deputy answering a call with lights and siren clipped a car while passing on the right on Santa Monica Boulevard, left the road at about fifty-five miles an hour and struck two men on the sidewalk; for the one left with a brain injury, broken ribs and leg and lasting damage to his vision, Mardirossian and Akaragian reconstructed the crash in three-dimensional models, the department's own investigation team found the deputy's speed unreasonable, and the county settled in 2019 for $42.2 million.

Where the Bike Lane Ended

In July 2012 Amir "Nick" Ekbatani, an offensive lineman at UCLA from 2006 to 2009, was riding his motorcycle on Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach when a taxi van driven by Mesfin Kinfu turned left across his path at Diamond Street. He survived thirteen surgeries after being given a two-percent chance, and lost a leg. Caltrans had ordered double-yellow lines painted at the sharply angled intersection in 2005 to stop early left turns, and the work was never done; there had been left-turn collisions there before. The case was tried for six weeks before Judge Anthony Mohr. Caltrans's lawyer told the jury, "We are here because Mr. Kinfu caused this accident"; Mardirossian told them, "This is what Caltrans could have prevented." In January 2017, after nearly three days of deliberation, the jury awarded $35 million and placed seventy percent of the fault on Caltrans, $27.5 million of the award, Kinfu having settled confidentially.

On March 18, 2016, Jonathan Tansavatdi, a teenager, was riding south on Hawthorne Boulevard in Rancho Palos Verdes, where the bike lane ended on a steep downhill between Dupre and Vallon drives, and was killed by an eighty-foot tractor-trailer at Vallon. On April 27, 2023, the California Supreme Court, unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Joshua Groban, rejected the city's design-immunity defense as a bar to the claim that it had failed to warn of a dangerous condition it knew its approved design had created, and sent his mother's case back for trial on that claim. In Purton v. Marriott International, decided July 31, 2013, a Marriott bartender who had drunk at the hotel's December 2009 holiday party drove home, then drove again and killed Dr. Jared Purton; Justice McIntyre's opinion reversed the summary judgment for the hotel, holding that an employer may be liable "as long as the proximate cause of the injury occurred within the scope of employment." In Lewis v. Ukran, decided June 26, 2019, after a bench trial had awarded the stunt performer Thyme Lewis $1,651,702.39 for the March 26, 2013 collision between a van and his motorcycle, Justice Brian Currey held that the party seeking to reduce future damages to present value bears the burden of proving the discount.

Night School

Mardirossian was president of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles in 2010. Armen Akaragian joined the Law Offices of Garo Mardirossian in 1999 as a legal assistant and law clerk, finished a business degree at California State University, Northridge in 2002, took his law degree at Southwestern at night in 2005 while he kept working, was admitted to the bar in 2006, and sat beside Mardirossian in Pannu, Mendoza, Lewis and the Santa Monica Boulevard case. The firm is now Mardirossian Akaragian LLP.