A man who was run over by a Long Beach city maintenance truck on the beach in 2014, causing him to suffer a broken pelvis and other injuries, was awarded $2.3 million late June, his attorneys announced.
The lawsuit states that Jonathan Soto, 66, was sleeping on the beach near the 5400 block of Ocean Boulevard the morning of February, 4 2014 when a Long Beach Parks & Recreation pickup truck—a large 2006 Dodge Ram driven by Stanley Willie Delaney—ran him over. The city worker was picking up trash.
“(Soto) was asleep and did not hear Delaney approach in the …vehicle,” the suit states. “Delaney failed to see plaintiff napping on the beach despite plaintiff being within Delaney’s clear and unobstructed line of vision.”
The victim filed a lawsuit against the city and the driver later that year and on June 22, 2016 a jury awarded him $2.3 million, said co-counsel Alex Steele.
Upon hearing the news of his case, the victim’s attorney David Lira said Soto was just very grateful to the jury and thankful to have closure for this difficult time in his life.
“The multimillion-dollar result in this case is illustrative of the more than $10 billion in verdicts and settlements the attorneys of Girardi and Keese have recovered for clients seriously injured or killed because of someone else’s actions,” Soto’s attorneys said in a statement late June.
This story was updated at 3:38PM with the victim’s reaction on the jury announcement.