Safari Victims Seek Millions From Chatsworth Tour Firm

Chatsworth-based Brendan Vacations Inc. should pay millions of dollars to three people attacked by bandits during a 2007 African nature walk, including a pregnant woman who lost her fetus, an attorney told a judge Tuesday.

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In her final argument to a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, lawyer Gayle Blatt said the attack on Rg and Jacqueline Lutz of Redondo Beach and his boyhood friend, Raymond Mollica, could have been prevented had one of their tour guides, Herman Kiriama, been properly trained and not tried to prevent the robbery.

"We are here because Herman increased the risk to them, he escalated a situation that was bad, but not deadly," Blatt said.

But defense attorney Jerri Johnson said the jury should find for Brendan Vacations because Blatt broke promises she made to the panel during opening statements concerning what she would prove. Johnson also said Blatt overstated the plaintiffs' damages.

"Make no mistake about it, this lawsuit is about money," she said. "You guys are now the arbitrators of reasonableness."

Jacqueline Lutz, 38, said she and her husband met with Mollica and his then-fiancee, Celia Vergel DeDios, at their hotel near Arusha, Tanzania, the first night of their joint vacation in March 2007. She said they discussed their plans to take the nature walk and the next morning met the tour guides, Kiriama and Charles Safari, before the two couples and a female tourist from Great Britain embarked on the walk to Lake Duluti.

She said they were initially confronted on the trail by a bandit holding a machete, who demanded their money. Although they complied, Kiriama began struggling with the man and then the second criminal began shooting in response, she said.

Jacqueline Lutz said she was unable to get medical attention from a doctor until hours after she was shot in the abdomen and was then told that her fetus had not survived. She and her husband, both commercial airline pilots, were experienced travelers who were on their first escorted tour.

Mollica was shot in the left leg. Safari was hit in the head by gunfire and died.

The Lutzes and Mollica, who lives on Long Island, N.Y., filed suit against Brendan Vacations in March 2009, alleging the company made numerous representations on its website regarding its "Splendor in the Serengeti" tour that led them to believe everyone involved in their safari trip once they reached Africa was a Brendan employee.

They maintain they only learned later that Brendan delegated most aspects of the trip to third-party companies, including the ground tour operator.

Blatt said the travelers had no way of knowing that Brendan was actually a wholesale company that bought slots within other companies' tours.

"Because the website said Brendan was family-owned and operated, they believed all of the people were Brendan," Blatt said.

She said Brendan—having given its customers the impression that it employed and had a hand in what the other firms' guides and drivers did—should have had a written manual that included how to act in a situation such as that which confronted the Lutzes and Mollica. The rules should then have been distributed to each employee on the tour who came in contact with Brendan's touring customers, she said.

Blatt also maintained that Kiriama should have let the robbery play out.

"When you are confronted, comply. Then there's a substantial probability the robbers would take only valuables and go away," she said. Mollica, who is now married to DeDios, also had a difficult time physically and emotionally while recovering from his wounds, Blatt said.

But Johnson said there is no evidence that Kiriama was not properly trained or that he was negligent, which Blatt had committed to prove to jurors in her opening statement.

"We don't know why he did what he did," she said.

Johnson said Kiriama was an experienced tour guide and that there is no evidence his actions caused the other bandit to shoot.

"You can comply all you want and they might still shoot you," she said.

Johnson also said Blatt also did not show that any reliance the plaintiffs had on the representations in the Brendan website caused their harm. She said the fault instead lies "100 percent on the criminals who shot these people."

Brendan representatives were exceptionally gracious after the shootings, she said. Gary Murphy, the son of company founder James Murphy, gave Rg Lutz his cell phone number and urged him to call if he needed his help, Johnson said.

— City News Service