Wrongful Death Suits

The widow of a factory worker alleges in a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court that her 36-year-old husband died from long-term exposure to a deadly chemical at the world's largest manufacturer of surfboard blanks. The wrongful-death suit filed last week against Clark Foam Products provides a partial explanation for the Laguna Niguel company's abrupt closure in December.

The widows of three firefighters killed in a 1998 helicopter crash in Griffith Park have asked a state appellate court to reinstate their wrongful-death claims against the aircraft's manufacturer, their attorney said Thursday.

The family of track star Florence Griffith Joyner is blaming a St. Louis hospital for her death, charging in a lawsuit that doctors failed to detect a brain abnormality two years earlier.

It was the failure of federal agents to control or extinguish the conflagration that caused the destruction of the Mount Carmel religious compound seven years ago, and the government should be forced to pay for its negligence, a lawyer representing Branch Davidian survivors and relatives told jurors Tuesday.

Linda Will, the mother of late Northwestern football player Rashidi Wheeler, was awarded an estimated $10.7 million Friday, 70% of the $16-million settlement the university agreed to pay last year to end a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Wheeler's family after his 2001 practice-field death.

Los Angeles County supervisors have agreed to pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the children of Edith Rodriguez, the woman who died after writhing in pain for 45 minutes on the waiting-room floor of Martin Luther King Jr.