Torrance Tapping Reserves to Help Settle Last of 3 Police Suits

Torrance officials will take a total of $1.5 million from three reserve funds to partially cover the cost of a $6.5-million legal settlement with the family of Kelly Rastello, who was killed in a 1984 traffic collision with an off-duty Torrance police officer.

“This is a major cost factor to the city,” City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson said last week. The settlement comes at a time of “fairly restrained economic projections. . . . (But) it’s manageable. It will not directly affect services.”

The reserve funds will be replenished over the next three to five years, city officials said.

The officials take some solace from the fact that the settlement, the largest in Torrance history, is the last in a chain of three costly lawsuits involving the Police Department. No other major police-related lawsuits are pending, said City Atty. Kenneth L. Nelson.

The Rastello settlement, announced May 20, resolved a wrongful-death suit brought by the family of Rastello, 19, who died in an accident with Sgt. Rollo Green.

A Los Angeles Superior Court jury in 1989 concluded that Torrance police covered up for Green in the accident. The jury awarded Rastello’s father, John, $5.5 million. A judge ordered the city to pay an additional $2.1 million in attorneys’ fees, which, with accrued interest, meant the city owed more than $9 million in the case.

Lawyers for the city and the Rastellos forged the $6.5-million compromise last month.

The settlement hits the city particularly hard because it requires a lump-sum payment, and only $3.5 million of the $6.5 million payment will be covered by insurance. The city is taking the remaining $3 million from a special reserve fund for general liability claims.

To replenish that fund, the City Council on Tuesday agreed to transfer $1.5 million into it from three other funds.

A total of $500,000 will come from a fund intended to cover “economic anomalies,” or unexpected economic problems, leaving about $1.1 million in that account as of July 1. Another $500,000 will come from a reserve for self-insurance catastrophes, leaving $687,000. And $500,000 will come from a reserve for compensation emergencies, depleting the account.

The city’s general fund budget is about $100 million.

In another much-publicized case, the city last November agreed to pay more than $1.9 million to settle a lawsuit brought by construction worker Patrick J. Coyle, who was shot in the neck by a police officer during a 1988 traffic stop.

In that case, the city agreed to pay Coyle and his wife $750,000 in the first year, with the remaining payments over 15 years.

The third major police-related settlement grew out of a lawsuit brought by Francisco Yuri of Carson, who claimed police broke his neck with a billy club. The city agreed to pay Yuri $1.1 million, with $500,000 paid immediately, $100,000 a year later and a final $500,000 to be paid over 15 years.