Shamsi Khani

Jury selection was beginning in the manslaughter trial of George Russell Weller last week when Shamsi Khani made her final trip to the Santa Monica Farmers' Market, picking up the usual tomatoes along with plums and apricots to make her family's favorite fruit rolls. For years, the matriarch of an extended Iranian Jewish family had strolled on her own to the market from her ocean-view Santa Monica condo.

Jury selection was beginning in the manslaughter trial of George Russell Weller last week when Shamsi Khani made her final trip to the Santa Monica Farmers' Market, picking up the usual tomatoes along with plums and apricots to make her family's favorite fruit rolls. For years, the matriarch of an extended Iranian Jewish family had strolled on her own to the market from her ocean-view Santa Monica condo.

By most accounts, including her own, Shamsi Khani was a goner. As an ambulance rushed her to UCLA Medical Center from the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on July 16, it passed Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood. "This isn't my cemetery," she told the paramedical team. "You have to take me to Sinai Temple." It turns out that God was not ready for Khani, even if she is 88.

By most accounts, including her own, Shamsi Khani was a goner. As an ambulance rushed her to UCLA Medical Center from the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on July 16, it passed Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood. "This isn't my cemetery," she told the paramedical team. "You have to take me to Sinai Temple." It turns out that God was not ready for Khani, even if she is 88.

As his 89-year-old mother lay battered and broken in a hospital bed a year ago, Dan Khani would squeeze fresh basil between his fingertips and hold it up to her nose, reciting in Hebrew: "Thank you, God, for giving me the ability to smell the aroma of this product of your nature." Such small connections, Khani had said last August, helped pull his mother back "virtually from the other world" after she was grievously injured when an errant driver slammed through the Santa Monica Farmers' Market.

Lindsay Strachan hurried through the stalls at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on a recent Wednesday, hoping to find some premium Rainier cherries before they sold out. A regular at the market, which occupies several Santa Monica streets twice a week, Strachan says his routine has changed since an old Buick LeSabre slammed into shoppers and toppled farm stands, killing 10 people and injuring 63 others. "I look around a lot more," he said.

For 25 minutes Monday, a judge attacked George Russell Weller's "enormous indifference" and "unbelievable callousness" in running down and killing 10 pedestrians in a Santa Monica open-air market. The 89-year-old deserved prison for his crime, the judge said. But in the end, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson placed Weller on probation, finding that his age and poor health undercut any value to imprisonment. "Mr.

Rejecting the portrait of an old man who made a tragic mistake in his maroon Buick, a jury Friday found George Russell Weller guilty of felony manslaughter for running down and killing 10 people at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market in a case that set off a debate about licensing older drivers. Weller, 89, was allowed to miss the trial because he is ailing, and he was not in Los Angeles County Superior Court when the verdict was read. He could be sentenced to 18 years in prison.