Woman hit in Sebastopol crosswalk as teen, loses lawsuit

A 20-year-old Rohnert Park woman who suffered permanent brain damage after being struck by a car in a Sebastopol crosswalk has lost a nearly three-month civil trial against the city and Caltrans.

Jurors last week found that the crosswalk at Florence and Healdsburg avenues where Julia Bertoli was hit in 2009 was not dangerous, relieving Caltrans of liability. Earlier in the month, Judge Gary Nadler dismissed the city from the lawsuit, finding it neither owned nor controlled the crosswalk.

The Bertoli family, which maintained that shadows cast by nearby trees made the crosswalk hard to see, was seeking $17 million for economic damages and millions more to pay for Bertoli’s care for the rest of her life.

Steven Mitchell, the city’s attorney, said the verdict suggests jurors felt Bertoli and the driver of the car, Linda Chilvers of Forestville, were responsible. Chilvers reached a pretrial settlement with the family for an undisclosed amount.

Mitchell said some witnesses testified Bertoli was using a cellphone at the time of the accident and not being attentive, although other evidence suggested otherwise.

“It was a disputed fact,” Mitchell said. “But there were definitely witnesses who said she was on a phone.”

Bertoli’s lawyer, David Rouda, said he would seek a new trial on the grounds that he was not permitted by the judge to show all the evidence. He said “irregularities” in the trial made the result a foregone conclusion. He declined to elaborate.

“The family feels they did not have their day in court,” Rouda said. “They did not feel there was justice served. And they feel, like I do, that there was a lot of evidence the jury wasn’t allowed to hear that they should have heard.”

Testimony began in February. Rouda presented an initial 75 hours of evidence, including video simulations and expert statements, and received a short extension.

After he was done, the judge granted the city’s request to be dismissed from the case. Lawyers for Caltrans presented less than 10 hours of evidence before the jury was sent out to deliberate, Mitchell said.

The panel deliberated about 45 minutes before deciding on a 10-2 vote that the crosswalk wasn’t dangerous, Mitchell said.

“The judge appropriately left it up to the jury to decide whether having a shadow on a crosswalk was a dangerous condition as defined by law,” Mitchell said. “And the jury, after hearing three months of evidence, decided that it was not, that shadows are essentially a natural condition.”

You can reach Staff Writer Paul Payne at 568-5312 or paul.payne@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ppayne.