Local News in Brief : City Urged to Settle Claim

A North Hollywood man who claimed that a Los Angeles police officer beat him after an argument outside a bar, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, will collect $460,000 from the city if the Los Angeles City Council approves a recommendation by the city attorney’s office.

The Police Department said no evidence was found that the attack occurred. But the attorney for the disabled 31-year-old man, Jose Alfaro, said he found two witnesses.

“If a jury were to choose to believe plaintiff and his two alleged eyewitnesses, a verdict against the city in the sum of several million dollars would not be unreasonable,” Assistant City Atty. Ward G. McConnell said in a report recommending settlement of Alfaro’s lawsuit.

Alfaro’s lawyer, Paul deMontesquiou, said Alfaro walked out of a bar near Lankershim and Victory boulevards shortly after midnight on June 3, 1982, with a bottle of beer. An unidentified officer ordered him to drop the bottle, deMontesquiou said. Alfaro threw the bottle down, he said, and words were exchanged.

DeMontesquiou said the officer, who his client could not identify, rushed Alfaro and applied a chokehold--a controversial restraint banned by the Police Department one month earlier.