Five years can feel like five months and five minutes all at once when you’re grieving. Pediatric dentist Dr. Pat Davis said the grief hasn’t let up.
“I feel as lonely and as lost today as I felt when this accident happened,” he said.
Davis and his family were celebrating his sister-in-law's cancer remission at Grandview Beach in Encinitas in August 2019.
His sister-in-law, Elizabeth, his wife, Julie, and his daughter, Annie, were sitting against the bluffs when they collapsed — crushing them to death.
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“What happened to this family was really predictable and predicted decades ago," attorney Bibi Fell said.
Fell has been a partner on Davis’ case. She said the same bluffs collapsed before in the 80s and took out the stair access to the beach. She said then, the state sent an engineer to survey the damage and recommend if the bluffs should be reopened.
“That engineer's conclusion was, ‘We should not rebuild the stairs. The bluffs are going to continue to collapse, and if you rebuild the stairs and bring people down there, people are going to get hurt again,’” Fell said. “Those recommendations were not listened to.”
It happened again in 2019, which is partially why the Davis family sued the city and state.
“That was always our number one thing, to try and get some changes so that this wouldn't happen to anyone else,” Davis said.
The settlement was more than $32 million combined.
Encinitas Mayor Tony Kranz issued a statement saying: “This is a tragic situation … Bluff failures are a natural and unavoidable occurrence, so the city continues to do its best to educate and warn beach patrons to stay as far away as possible from the bluffs.”
Whenever Davis visits the beach and sees people sitting along the bluffs, it turns his stomach.
“I remind the lifeguards that isn't it part of their job to warn those people that people died there, sitting right where they're sitting? And they agree with me, and then they run down the stairs and tell the people to move," he said.
As part of the settlement, the city agreed to post more signage warning the public about bluff failures. It’s also agreed to train its lifeguards to warn the public as well.
Davis said when he sees change, then he’ll feel closure.
"Julie was the love of my life. Annie was the kind of girl that everybody loved,” he said. “It's just hard to be without them.”
