The long-awaited opening day of the Bennett-Harris family’s civil suit against the California National Guard dawned this morning in a Downtown courtroom with a middle-aged court employee practically squealing like a teenybopper:
“Oooh, Mr. Geragos, I finally get to see you in action.”
He blushed and softly replied “Yes, you will.”
What felt like a hackneyed 1950s quip out of Hollywood occurred on the third floor of the Hill Street courthouse where the celebrated lawyer Mark Geragos reportedly is attempting to win a $5 million to $10 million judgment against the Guard for the brutal four-year-old fatal battering of potential Guard recruit JoAnn Crystal Harris, 29 years old and pregnant. Ms. Harris’s three surviving siblings have brought the suit in the name of their grieving 71-year-old mother, Martha Lou Harris, who died last August.
In his opening argument this afternoon, Mr. Geragos contended that even though Guard colleagues and superiors of the convicted killer, Sgt. Scott Ansman, knew weeks, if not months, in advance of his intentions to harm her, even that he was seeking out a hit man, they did nothing to impede him.
Never elevating his voice above a one-to-one conversational tone as he spent 25 minutes addressing the 12 jurors, Mr. Geragos suggested the Culver City Police Dept. also was culpable.
He said that three members of the Culver City-based National Guard held a midnight meeting with police Det. Jay Garocochea three weeks before Mr. Ansman committed murder at the Guard Armory and then calmly telephoned police.
But, according to Mr. Geragos, the outcome of the hour-plus gathering at the police station turned out emptily. No move was made against the future killer and no one — from the cops or the Guard — ever warned Ms. Harris of impending danger.
One reason may have been that until the day before her murder, no one besides Mr. Ansman seems to have known her name.
Dept. Atty. Gen. David Adida, for the defense, said that during the three weeks between the police station summit and the spectacular homicide, members of the Guard contacted Mr. Garocochea “four or five” times to learn progress police were making. They never received a return call, the attorney said.
Mr. Geragos’s central claim was that there were screaming warning sounds from the “crazy acting” Mr. Ansman all summer, right up to the day of Ms. Harris’s murder, Friday, Aug. 24, 2007. Neither Guard or police made any attempt to intercept, to deflect, to examine, to punish Mr. Ansman, who had been acting “unhinged” on a daily basis.
The trial is expected to last two weeks or more.
