San Diego paying out $1M to settle discrimination case, police shooting lawsuit, crash injuries

San Diego is paying out more than $1 milion to settle four lawsuits, including ones over accusations of employment discrimination, a fatal police shooting and a crash in an allegedly dangerous Point Loma intersection.

The largest payout is $600,000 to Daniel Vander Meer, who was seriously injured, with multiple bones broken, when he was hit by a car on his motorcycle at Catalina Boulevard and Del Mar Avenue.

He and the driver who broadsided him, Tony Sandri, argued in court documents that the city negligently failed to make the intersection safer. The city’s settlement with Vander Meer also resolves all cross claims.

In a second road-related case, the city is paying $60,000 to Michael Gailband, a bicyclist who broke his left hip after hitting a raised concrete panel in a bike lane on East Harbor Drive north of Schley Street in Barrio Logan.

Gailband’s suit blames the raised concrete panel on a sewer project completed in the area about six years before the crash.

In a third case, San Diego is paying out $250,000 to a longtime city employee who says he was denied promotions because he is Black and that city officials failed to prevent discrimination against him.

Wilson Kennedy III, who has worked as a management analyst, has written city training manuals and helped develop worker training programs. He said in his 2021 lawsuit that has was denied promotions and other opportunities he sought more than 80 times in 12 years.

He said he rarely got interviewed for the jobs he sought and that there were times when his applications weren’t even acknowledged. Those jobs often went to non-Black candidates with less experience, he said.

The city has consistently denied all the allegations.

In the fourth case, San Diego is paying out $125,000 to the family of former UC San Diego scientist Yan Li, who was shot and killed by three county sheriff’s deputies and one city police officer serving her an eviction notice. The county settled its part of the case earlier this year for $825,000.

In their lawsuit, her family argued Li was clearly having a mental health episode when she answered the door, holding a kitchen knife and suggesting the deputy was an intruder, and that law enforcement should have recognized that.

Officers’ body-worn camera footage shows Li opening the door holding a knife down at her side. A deputy hands her the paperwork, spots the knife, draws his gun and shouts: “Put the knife down right now or I’m gonna (expletive) shoot.”

He repeats the order, and Li shouts back for him to put his gun down. “How could I know you are not intruder?” she asks, then yells, “Call the police!” She accuses him of being a fake police officer, throws the paperwork and slams her door.

Less than an hour later, officers enter her apartment, and a chaotic scene followed, video shows. The city says Li charged the officers with a knife, stabbed one and kept trying to stab others. She died at the scene of gunshot wounds.

The City Council unanimously approved all four settlements Monday.