1994 Police Brutality Case Settled

The City Council announced a $125,000 lawsuit settlement this week with a woman who alleged a police officer broke her jaw and loosened five teeth on July 4, 1994.

Allison Jill Gonsowski was a 17-year-old Edison High School student when, she said, an officer hit her in the face with a baton during an unprovoked attack. The holiday was one of the most raucous in a history of troubled Fourths for the city.

Police arrested 150 people as officers swept through downtown in riot gear and used a water truck to disperse crowds. Revelers had set furniture ablaze in the street and pelted police with firecrackers, bottles and rocks.

Some residents complained it was the officers who caused the melee with overzealous crowd control. Gonsowski was one of 10 people who filed brutality complaints against the department.

FBI agents investigating possible civil rights violations by the police that day interviewed Gonsowski in the fall of 1994. But she couldn’t pick out her attacker when showed photographs of the officers on duty that night “because it happened in a split second.”

“But I want the FBI to do something about this, so the police will have to be restrained in how they approach innocent citizens,” she said in a 1995 interview.

Neither she nor her attorney, David Diamond of Los Angeles, could be reached for comment Friday.

The settlement announcement came during the same meeting Monday night at which city officials gave the post-mortem for this year’s Fourth of July celebration.

Residents and City Administrator Michael T. Uberuaga praised police efforts to keep the holiday relatively peaceful and incident-free.

Police spokesman Lt. Dan Johnson said officers made about one-fifth as many Independence Day arrests as they did in 1996.