Although it has been nearly fifteen months since a San Francisco public works vehicle struck and killed Rui Xia Zhen, her husband will have to wait another year before a trial determines whether the city is liable in Zhen’s death, reports Mission Local.
Zhen’s husband, Huang Zheng Fang, is 73 years old and now subsists on $434 in monthly retirement checks, telling Mission Local that he eats as little as one meal a day to scrape by.
The couple had been married for 41 years, and the 67-year-old Chinese American woman was the household’s only source of income. According to a forensic economics report by Robert W. Johnson and Associates, her lost income could be worth $1.65 million, assuming Fang lives to be 85.
Yet ending this economic hardship, Fang told Mission Local, would not amount to justice. “She is dead,” he said. “And you cannot make her come alive again.”
The city of San Francisco is willing to admit liability for purposes of settlement, but not in trial. Fang’s attorney, Joseph Breall, told Mission Local that he began his settlement request at $6 million and is down to $2 million, while the city has gone as high as $950,000.
Zhen was a loved wife and mother, as well as a treasured friend and co-worker. She served on the board of the SEIU longterm caregiver’s union, and a month after her death, volunteers brought the union 3000 masks to honor her legacy, according to the SEIU Local 2015’s Facebook page.
Zhen was hit in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco by a department pickup truck driven by a street cleaning crew, according to SF Weekly. Through March of 2020 it was the third pedestrian death in the city, including one other in the Tenderloin, which members of pedestrian advocacy groups told SF Weekly is the “ground zero” for rising traffic accidents in the city.
As he awaits the trial next summer, Fang is at home with his son, Ray, who moved from New Jersey to support his father, according to Mission Local. Amidst an ongoing pandemic, both are currently unemployed, forced to spend their days in idleness.
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