City Was Right to Settle in Killing

Two years of considering the facts surrounding the fatal shooting of a 77-year-old, unarmed man mistaken for a burglar by Huntington Beach police have produced what appears to be a fair solution.

Last month, the Huntington Beach City Council agreed to pay $500,000 to the children of Theodore Franks. An attorney said that in years of representing the city, it was the largest settlement involving a police shooting he could remember.

Another lawyer said both sides had agreed tentatively to present a jury with only the admission that the city was at fault, but not to present the details of Franks’ death. That agreement probably would have worked to Huntington Beach’s benefit, because if all the facts were presented, a jury likely would have had sympathy for Franks’ children.

Franks, a longtime aerospace engineer, spent most nights during the week in the offices of a small engineering firm in a Huntington Beach industrial park while working on a project.

Two years ago, police responding to a burglary call from another business found the back door of Franks’ building, located next door, open. They announced their presence and began searching. In the predawn darkness, in cramped quarters, Officer Dean Michael was startled by Franks and shot him in the leg, an investigator said. Franks died later in a hospital. The Orange County district attorney’s office investigated the shooting and declined to file charges against Michael, who police said since has left the force. The officer was a policeman for 10 years, and a prosecutor called the shooting “an unfortunate incident.”

It most certainly was. Franks clearly was an innocent victim. Police officers do need to be ready to confront just about any situation imaginable, but training classes could use the Franks case to illustrate the need for caution in cases where no weapons are apparent.

In that way, the shooting of Franks differs from the 1983 case in which a Stanton policeman shot and killed a 5-year-old boy who appeared to him as a shadowy figure in a dark apartment holding a gun. The gun turned out to be a toy. Stanton paid the boy’s mother, who was not home at the time, $395,000 to settle her suit against the city.

There’s no doubt that police work demands near-instantaneous reflexes. A day after the Huntington Beach settlement, a Santa Ana police officer was shot in the leg by a man he had pulled over for driving with expired vehicle registration tags. The driver stepped out of his car and fired a number of rounds through the police car’s windshield.

Because of the danger of the job, juries usually are sympathetic to police, especially if they shoot an armed suspect. In most cases, shootings are a last resort and police display the restraint emphasized in their training. But Franks’ death obviously was a tragic mistake, and the city was right to admit it.