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PRO PER, BABY!
A Long Beach mother and daughter with a long history of representing themselves in court–and losing–are now taking on 7-Eleven
DEBRO AND STAR by RUSS ROCA
IT FEELS LIKE JUSTICE
It’s a chilly Friday night, and about 15 protesters have gathered outside a 7-Eleven store. “This ain’t Jena, it’s Long Beach!” they chant for a while. A short time later the refrain changes: “Blow your horns for justice!” When a few horns actually honk, it seems kinda righteous; it feels like justice. Because what allegedly happened inside that 7-Eleven store a few years ago doesn’t seem right or just at all. A woman—a strong, proud, African-American lesbian—says she slipped and fell down in that store. She says that when she went to the counter for help, one of the store’s customers assaulted her, knocking her to the floor again. She says the store employee behind that counter responded to the incident by . . . well, by not responding at all. She says he proceeded to sell her assailant some beer, leaving her to fend for herself.
The woman has filed a lawsuit against the 7-Eleven—declining the company’s offer to settle out of court—and with the help of her sickly mother has been trying to whip up public outrage about the alleged incident and public support for her legal case. That feels good and fair, too—in the way we like to remember the 1960s, when people got things done. To other people.
If only everything else were this neat and easy.
STAR-FIGHTER
The case of Star Harris vs. 7-Eleven, Inc., comes next to a status conference Oct. 29 at San Pedro Courthouse, and there’s always the chance it could end there with a financial settlement. That would be the simple way. It could even be considered a win for Harris, and one she sorely needs. A settlement with 7-Eleven—any settlement—would go a long way toward paying Harris’ back rent, or part of the $87,000 judgment a Long Beach hairstylist won against her in 2001.
But settling things the simple way doesn’t seem like something that 39-year-old Star Harris, a.k.a. Michelle Harris, a.k.a. Michelle Star Harris, is apt to do. Otherwise, she might have taken the $15,000 that 7-Eleven attorneys offered her to drop this case in 2006. No, Harris seems to think this case can win her $2 million. That’s the figure she mentioned in a 2006 letter to her then-landlord, asking that she not be evicted for unpaid rent, suggesting that a big payoff was just over the horizon. That didn’t seem as likely to the landlord. She went ahead and evicted Harris.
If History is indeed a goddess, she, too, is telling Harris that it’s unlikely she’ll see the $2 million victory. She and her mother, Debro Saad, have been involved in 36 separate court cases since Jan. 1, 1995—including this suit against this same 7-Eleven chain and franchise owner in 2005. They have sued and they have been sued. They have lost many. They have won a few. But they keep right on going, many times without even hiring an attorney.
“They consider them fights. That’s what they call them—‘We’ve got another fight,’” says a former acquaintance of Harris, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. “They’ve been at it so long, I think people say, ‘Whatever.’”
Maybe some people do. Not 7-Eleven. Apparently not Harris. This time, unlike so many other times, she’s actually hired an attorney to represent her.
“Yes, fighting, always fighting. Somebody bothering me, somebody doing something. You gotta choose your fights today,” says Harris, whose MySpace page documents the 7-Eleven incident. “I see bigger and better for me.”
PHOTO by DANIEL DEBOOM
‘WE’VE ALL INVESTED IN SLURPEES’
This particular fight began at the 7-Eleven franchise at 10th Street and Long Beach Boulevard. Just past midnight on Aug. 20, 2004, Harris claims she tripped over a crate at the back of the store. She went to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was diagnosed with head trauma and a strained back. In recent interviews for this story, Harris says she broke three ribs in the fall. There is no mention of broken ribs in the Cedars-Sinai report.
Harris’ story is both enhanced and complicated by security camera footage, which she and her mother say they obtained through their first attorney on the case.
On a DVD recording of that footage, Harris—a tall and slender woman wearing an oversized, long-sleeved, collared shirt and baseball cap—first appears as she makes her way slowly toward the front of the store. She leans on the counter, periodically holding her left side with her hand. A store employee hands her what appears to be a cell phone; Harris says she used it to call 911.
While on the phone, Harris gets into a conversation with a stocky man who’s filmed coming in with a friend, bantering with a store clerk, and lining up behind Harris to pay for a case of beer. There’s no audio on the DVD, but Harris says the man accosted her—making derogatory references to her race and sexual preference.
Then you see him take a swing at her, appearing to connect with her right shoulder—and Harris falls down for what she says was the second time that night, landing almost out of camera range. Her black cap is barely visible below the store counter. The man seems so worked up that he appears to charge after her, apparently standing over her for a moment—then finishes paying for his beer and leaves with his friend.
“I was completely knocked out. I do remember him standing over me and spitting on me or whatever on the way out,” Harris says in our first interview for this story, at the protest she and her mother organized. “When we got the tape, I see him and all the other customers standing over me.” 7-Eleven spokeswoman Margaret Chabris declined to discuss details of the case because it hasn’t been settled.
But Harris says this incident isn’t only about her.
“It could have been any of us,” she contends. “We’ve all invested in Slurpees and Big Gulps all our lives.”
Harris’s mother, Debro Saad, a.k.a. Debro Onn Saad, a.k.a. Debro Cherry Saad, agrees that her daughter’s case is about a more pervasive problem. Actually, a bunch of problems.
“We’re hurt that our society hasn’t come any further than to knock a woman out in a store,” says Saad. “‘If only she had been white’—that’s what the mediator and the attorneys told us. Oh, my goodness, the raping that’s gone on in the halls of the San Pedro courthouse. I’m on oxygen, I’ve had 41 operations for my medical condition and I’m still standing. I will still be standing until justice is served.”
That may mean a lot more standing. In less than two years, this case has had more plot twists than the parts they cut out of a James Ellroy novel to make the rest of it into a movie:
• Harris’ first attorney, Timothy Ryan of Huntington Beach, asked to be taken off the case in February after Harris decided not to take 7-Eleven’s $15,000 offer to settle.
“The judge recommended what 7-Eleven was offering. He recommended [Harris] take that offer,” Ryan says. “I recommended it. And we had a difference of opinion on the value of the case.” In his request to be removed, Ryan wrote, “Ms. Harris . . . thought her case was worth $1,000,000.00.”
Ryan extricated himself from the case in late March, and Harris represented herself until June. It’s not like she didn’t have plenty of experience doing that. “Pro per, baby,” quips Saad—deploying with enthusiasm the Latin term “in propria persona”—to represent oneself.
• Sometime after he was relieved as counsel, Ryan says, Harris “sent a newsletter or a flier out disparaging my name. That’s not good on her part. She shouldn’t do that. That borders on defamation.”
Ryan is quick to add that he’s not planning to actually sue Harris for defamation.
For her part, Harris denies disparaging Ryan, insisting she never published any such newsletter or flier.
• Harris admits she never filed a police report on the assault that allegedly happened at 7-Eleven after she slipped and fell. She says police visited her in the hospital that night and took a report, but that the pain from her injuries prevented her from fully discussing the incident. But the lawyer she’s retained since June 25, Damon Martin, claims the alleged assault wasn’t even part of the original complaint against 7-Eleven—despite references to it in the court record. Martin tried unsuccessfully in August to amend the original complaint, and was denied in September. Martin did not return telephone calls requesting comment.
• Earlier this month, attorneys for 7-Eleven asked the court to bar a jury from viewing the security DVD, to bar Harris from making any reference to the alleged altercation inside the store, and to bar Harris from calling her mother as a witness should the case go to trial.
“This motion is made on the grounds that Plaintiff’s mother has no personal knowledge of the alleged incident,” 7-Eleven attorneys wrote Oct. 3—meaning that while Saad has heard what happened, she wasn’t actually there when it went down. They also called Saad “extremely biased, disruptive and offensive,” and said she “would mislead the jury.”
DEBRO SAAD by RUSS ROCA
‘THE MAMA MOTION’
Okay, wait a minute. Debro Saad—disruptive? Misleading? When I meet Saad and her daughter a second time, at Long Beach Cafe, Saad does most of the talking—but she is soft-spoken, and cries frequently as we view the security camera footage on the tiny personal DVD player the duo brings with them.
But there’s this, from 7-Eleven attorney James E. Oldendorph Jr. on Oct. 3: “At the December 21, 2006, mediation, defense counsel discovered that Ms. Saad was ‘controlling’ all settlement negotiations and claimed to have superior legal knowledge as she was ‘sitting for the Bar Exam in the near future.’”
And this, again from Oldendorph: “On Feb. 7, 2007, Plaintiff appeared with her mother at the [hearing to allow Ryan to be excused from the case]. Plaintiff and her mother sat behind Plaintiff’s counsel in the audience, hurling insults and derogatory comments at Mr. Ryan for the entire courtroom to hear.” Debro Saad calls this 7-Eleven filing “the mama motion.” She says she personally filed a response to this motion—and that the court has never answered it.
For her part, Saad remains circumspect.
“There’s a reason this case is still on the docket,” she says ominously, over a plate of liver and onions and a salad with a side of feta cheese. “There’s something not quite right about it. Believe me, if they could have figured out a way to make this go away they would have.”
She’s probably got something there. Court documents make it quite clear that 7-Eleven attorneys wish Harris and Saad would go away—they’d just rather not pay to have that happen. And the lawyers aren’t the only ones who wish they’d never laid eyes on these two—or hope desperately that they’ve seen the last of them.
DAILY DAMAGES
“It’s amazing how one person can walk into your life and damage it so profoundly,” says Nancy Downs.
Downs manages the architecturally significant Art Deco apartment building at 505 E. Broadway. Harris submitted a rent application there in early 2006, at a time when Downs was out of the country. “I was in Europe and Tanya [Sample, her assistant] couldn’t run the credit check,” Downs says. “We’re just a little company.”
Harris moved in, and life was beautiful for about two months—until June 1, 2006, when, according to court records, Harris stopped paying rent. She was served an eviction notice June 15—and according to a June 28, 2006, letter Downs wrote to the Los Angeles Superior Court, “[Harris] called the next day and threatened Tanya and myself . . . . She stated at this phone call that things were missing from her unit and that she could see no signs of a break in [sic].”
Asked about this, Harris tells The District that Sample broke into her apartment and took some jewelry. Court records show that on June 21, 2006, Harris sued Downs in Long Beach small claims court, and that on June 26, 2006, Harris filed papers seeking a restraining order against Sample.
“I ain’t got nothing good to say about her,” Sample says now. “You want me to say something good about her?”
Harris seems to have tried at least once more to smooth things over—holding out the hope that 7-Eleven would settle, and that she’d be flush with cash and ready to pay Downs back rent. In an unsigned June 29, 2006, letter to “Downs Property” contained in court records, someone writes, “In conclusion, a mediation date has been entered into for Star Harris to deliberate in a case, Star Harris vs. 7-Eleven for [a] $ two million dollar settlement. Even then Star Harris would not fail to pay her rent . . . .”
But Downs would have none of it, and evicted Harris for non-payment.
“I needed another week” to pay, Harris recalls now, “and [Downs] went on and evicted me anyway, and in a week I had the money.”
Downs says things got stranger in court.
“She did everything she could do in the corridor of the courthouse before we went on, to try to instigate me and egg me on. And then she would turn to other people and say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what this b-i-t-c-h has done to me,” Downs says, spelling out the word. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life and I’ve been doing this for 25 years.
“She stalked me and stalked me,” Downs says of Harris’ behavior as the case played out. “Just trying to follow us to the car and she would drive around my office all day long trying to intimidate us. I am 60 years old and there is nothing that makes me blink an eye. She is by far one of the most violent people I’ve ever met. I believe that she was capable of anything.”
Harris denies trying to provoke Downs outside the courtroom, and says she never stalked her former landlord.
“People will say anything they want to say,” Harris says. “There’s really nothing there to dig up. I’m an educated, intelligent black person whom they pre-judged.”
In July 2006, a Long Beach judge ruled against Harris, ordering her to pay Downs back rent, “daily damages” and attorney’s fees totaling $1,778.30; Downs says Harris has never paid her a cent of what she owes. And in August 2006, a Long Beach small claims court judge ruled that Downs didn’t owe Harris any money, as a result of Sample’s alleged theft from her apartment.
RENT, THE MOVING
Then again, this isn’t the only time Harris or her mother has fallen behind on rent.
A search of Los Angeles County court records from Jan. 1, 1995 to Sept. 30, 2007, reveals that more than a half-dozen landlords from Paramount to Long Beach have sought to evict either Harris or her mother. In seven eviction cases (including Nancy Downs’ case) reviewed by The District, the renters—either Harris or Saad—lost every time. Combined judgments against both: $11,081.64.
“I don’t think we fought those,” Harris says. “Those were slumlords. They didn’t want to fix anything. We said, ‘Do what you want to do. We’re out.’ ”
In each of these cases, either Harris or Saad—sometimes both—represented themselves.
Why that was—whether the women thought they could do a better job pro per, or maybe didn’t have the dough to pay a high-priced mouthpiece—is the topic of considerable fascination, and discussion among folks whom their lives have, er, touched.
“There are so many people who have learned to milk the system, and Star’s one of the better ones,” Downs says. “She’s learned. And while she was suing me, she got to live in that unit free. It was about two months.”
Harris’ former acquaintance offers an insider’s perspective on the pair.
“These two people have no one but each other, and whoever else they bring into their little gang,” says the person. “They work on a completely different level, like they’re above the law.”
“You’re familiar with the term ‘litigious plaintiff,’ just people that file and file and file and file?” Timothy Ryan asks. “Ultimately the court will take a stance. It’s not good. It clogs up the court system.”
Harris is terse on the subject of why she and her mother haven’t hired lawyers: “We didn’t need ’em,” she says. But consider the outcomes of these additional cases—in which Harris and Saad also represented themselves each and every time:
• In 1996, Saad sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—alleging she sprained her spine and bruised “[her] entire body” when something (probably an MTA bus) “closed the doors on her person.” That case was dismissed with prejudice—against Saad.
• In 1997, Saad sued a Long Beach K-Mart store and the store supervisor for $5,000 in “damages incurred while shopping at K-Mart” on Dec. 17, 1996—according to Saad’s handwritten small claims case filing. The court ruled against Saad—but didn’t award the store any damages.
“If you see it and I fought for it, it was wrong,” Saad says. “I’m not a habitual sue-er. I’m just a person who says, ‘Get the hell off of me.’ It’s not against the law to have 50 lawsuits.”
• In 1997, the State of California Employment Development Department sued Harris—who lost and was ordered to pay $1,855.37 in damages, attorney fees, costs, and interest.
• In 1997 and 1998, Harris filed three small claims cases in Long Beach against Greg Timmons, Erika Timmons—and her business, Timmons Volkswagen of Long Beach. Two of the three cases were dismissed; in the third, a judge ruled in favor of Greg Timmons—but didn’t award him any damages.
• In 2000, Long Beach lawyer and Ace Hardware store owner Trent Barnes sued Harris—but interestingly, Barnes couldn’t remember what the case was about. No matter; it was dismissed in 2000.
• In 2000, Harris filed two lawsuits against a man named Ron De Contreras and his Long Beach company, Pacific Hair Design. First in January 2000 was a small claims lawsuit alleging De Contreras stole $4,900 in salon equipment. Second was a February 2000 request from Harris for a restraining order against De Contreras. That request was denied—and in small claims court, the judge ruled that Harris actually owed De Contreras $2,450 in damages.
“I left it alone. I didn’t care. I didn’t pay it,” Harris says. “Like I say, I choose my fights.”
• In 2001, Long Beach hairstylist Susan Burgess sued Harris, alleging that Harris’ then-business, Starz Barber and Beauty Salon, “was trying to ride on the coattails” of Burgess’ business, Stars Salon, a block away. “The management would send me the guests in all the hotels,” says Burgess, whose salon is in the 400 block of East Ocean Boulevard. Some of them would mistakenly visit Starz Barber—in the 400 block of East First Street—“and have a bad experience. I was getting in bad with all the hotels,” says Burgess, who won an $87,092 judgment against Harris. The court mandated Harris change the name of her salon. Burgess says Harris has never paid her a cent, but Harris sees the outcome differently.
“I didn’t have to change [the name]. The city allowed that to be my [business] name,” she says. “I don’t care what court records say. The City of Long Beach okayed that. I’ll have a bankruptcy filing before I allow anybody to get a dime of my money.”
• In 2005, Saad enjoyed a spirited exchange with her then-landlord, Bernard David Berlyn. According to court records, Saad actually won a $5,000 judgment against Berlyn in August 2005. Saad also tried twice to get a restraining order against Berlyn—succeeding the second time—before Berlyn sued her in December 2005. Berlyn’s case was dismissed in March 2006 after Saad moved out. Saad claims Berlyn’s lawyers maneuvered her into taking a settlement.
“I’m fighting every day to survive,” Saad says. “I haven’t just been sitting around every day suing people. But if you violate my rights as an American citizen, then I have no other recourse. The court system is our recourse.”
We’ll see how that works out.
THE BIG WIND-UP
If the legal system keeps functioning the way it seems to have worked so far, none of these other dozen or so cases should have a bearing on the big one: the 7-Eleven lawsuit. It’s just strange—and a little daunting—to consider everything that has led up to the possible resolution, in the next month, of Case No. NC037837. The big wind-up, if you will.
Harris is quiet and a bit withdrawn when I sit across from her on a Monday afternoon, in a booth at the Long Beach Cafe. She excuses herself at one point and goes back out to her 1965 Mustang, saying she’s forgotten her money—and when she comes back in, she doesn’t order.
“She’s invisible. My baby’s invisible,” Harris’ mother says, tears rolling down her face as we replay the 7-Eleven DVD and watch her daughter take a punch—again. “He looks like he could have killed her. And now he’s going to get a congratulatory beer.”
It is sad: even with an attorney, this is a tough case to win—especially considering the judge may not even allow that DVD in court. But regardless of whether she wins the case, Harris will always have something to remind her of it.
After I prod her several times, Harris finally tells me the case number. She shoves up the left sleeve of her gray Rocawear hoodie and reads it to me: Case No. NC037837. The case number is tattooed on the inside of her left forearm.
Tags: 7-Eleven, court, Debro Saad, Long Beach, slurpees, Star Harris
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