DA reaches settlement with UC Regents in UCLA lab fire case
By Daily Bruin Staff
July 27, 2012 3:49 p.m.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office dropped all criminal charges against the UC Board of Regents on Friday in connection with the 2009 death of a UCLA staff research assistant.
In exchange for having the charges dropped, the regents agreed to improve university safety measures and create a $500,000 scholarship at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law for the study of environmental law in the name of Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji, the researcher who died, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office released on Friday.
“(The District Attorney’s decision) is what we have been working towards,” said Kevin Reed, UCLA vice chancellor of legal affairs. “(Sangji’s death) was a tragedy but not a crime and never should have been charged as a crime. We are trying to look forward.”
Charges were first filed against the regents and Sangji’s supervisor Patrick Harran, a UCLA organic chemistry professor, on Dec. 27, 2011 in relation to the December 2008 lab fire that fatally burned Sangji. She died 18 days later, in January 2009, from injuries incurred in the fire.
The university and Harran were charged with failing to provide proper chemical safety training, to provide procedures for correcting unsafe work conditions in a timely manner and to require clothing appropriate for the work being done, according to the felony complaint that was filed.
But criminal charges have not been dropped against Harran, who faces more than four years in prison if convicted of the charges.
UCLA plans to remain in full support of the chemistry professor, and administrators called his charges unjust, according to a university statement released Friday.
The formal reading of Harran’s charges was postponed from Friday’s court date to allow the judge time to consider new evidence, said Harran’s defense attorney Thomas O’Brien. One recent development from the defense is a claim that Brian Baudendistel ““ the chief investigator from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health who found UCLA and Harran responsible for Sangji’s death in a criminal investigation ““ murdered a man in a botched drug deal as a teenager.
The defense alleges the investigator has the same name, birth date and fingerprints as the man who admitted to the murder in 1985, O’Brien said. Baudendistel, however, told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week that it was a different person of the same name.
Harran’s attorneys are planning to use this evidence to bring the investigator’s honesty into question at Harran’s next court date, set for Sept. 5.
Compiled by Erin Donnelly, Bruin senior staff.
