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The city is poised to pay $92,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by two wheelchair-bound men who got stranded outside the Powell Street Muni and BART station when a city-owned elevator was turned off.
"It was a regrettable incident that should never have happened," City Attorney Dennis Herrera said, "and the city has to make sure it never happens again."
The lawsuit that Robert Cruz, 61, and Darwin Dias, 75, filed in U.S. District Court alleges violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
It also reads like a scathing indictment of city services.
Cruz and Dias, both in motorized wheelchairs, say they took an elevator down from street level to meet friends at Cable Car Coffee in Hallidie Plaza on May 26, 2007. It was a Saturday at about 2:45 p.m.
When their friends left via BART, Cruz and Dias went to the elevator at about 4 p.m., only to find it shut off, their lawsuit says. A sign above the elevator said it only operates until 3 p.m. on weekends.
The two men found themselves trapped, facing 20 stairs up to street level and six stairs down to the station.
This, according to their lawsuit:
Cable Car Coffee staff? No help.
Two police officers who happened by? They suggested Cruz, in need of relief, urinate in a corner gutter.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From the City Insider in San Francisco:
