The surviving daughter and son of the key target of an accused madman, who viciously murdered eight people at a Seal Beach salon in Oct. 2011, this week filed a wrongful death lawsuit against shooter Scott Evans Dekraai.
According to the lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court, Chelsea Huff of Los Alamitos and her brother Chad Huff of Long Beach seek unspecified monetary damages from Dekraai, who faces murder charges for killing his 47-year-old, ex-wife, Michelle Fournier, in a child custody dispute.
Fournier was the mother of Chelsea and Chad Huff, who say the killing at Salon Meritage resulted in them not just losing precious years with their mother, but also having to altering their lives and incur substantial expenses to care for their half-brother, Dominic.
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Fournier's adult children also incurred large medical bills from the killings that were a result of Dekraai's “negligence, carelessness, recklessness, wantonness and unlawfulness.”
In the seven-page complaint filed by Lake Forest-based attorney Susan P. Sneidmiller, the plaintiffs seek damages including for emotional distress and economic losses as determined at a future trial.
The case has been assigned to veteran Superior Court Judge Franz Miller in the county's Central Justice Center in Santa Ana.
Dekraai, a Huntington Beach resident and former fishing boat captain, is locked inside the Theo Lacy Jail near The Block in Orange on a no-bail warrant.
His next appearance in criminal court is scheduled for Jan. 17.
Relatives of other victims of the killings have also filed wrongful death lawsuits against the defendant.
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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.