In March 2010, Ricardo Palacios–a commercial truck driver with Direct Advertising–tripped over a wheel chock at a package drop-off dock at Santa Ana's United States Post Office on Sunflower Avenue, landed hard and fractured bones in his left foot.
To force the federal government to pay his expenses (including surgeries) plus expected, future costs, Palacios sued in August 2012.
Initially, government lawyers fought the case–claiming the injury amounted to a relatively minor, big toe dislocation and asserting that the plaintiff blamed himself at the time of the incident for not paying attention to his surroundings.
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Mediation failed and a federal judge scheduled a five-day jury trial in Los Angeles.
But, in July, Palacios allowed a government picked doctor to conduct a thorough exam of the injuries and civil lawyers inside the U.S. Attorney's Office decided to abandon the fight this month.
Both parties stipulated to U.S. District Court Judge Fernando M. Olguin that a $135,000 payment from the federal treasury to Palacios ends the litigation.
According to court records, the truck driver originally demanded $1.2 million in compensation.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.