$50,000 Paid for Window Police Broke in Drug Raid : Suits: Plaintiff drops charges in the destructive 39th and Dalton search. Attorney for the city says settlement has nothing to do with furor over Rodney G. King beating.

In what her lawyer described as perhaps the “highest amount in legal history ever paid for one panel of broken glass,” a South-Central Los Angeles woman accepted a $50,000 settlement from the city Thursday for damage that police officers caused to her window during the 39th and Dalton raid.

Lillian D’Antignac, who had turned down an earlier offer to settle for $15,000, will now be dropped from a federal lawsuit that she and the owners of another piece of damaged property filed as a result of the raid. The suit named a long list of defendants, including Mayor Tom Bradley, City Council members, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and the 77 officers who took part in the raid.

Including the payment to D’Antignac, the city has paid $3.4 million to settle suits stemming from the Aug. 1, 1988, raid.

The only remaining plaintiffs, Cheri and Henry Lang, rejected a $600,000 offer made at the same time as D’Antignac’s. The Langs’ duplex was heavily damaged when officers armed with search warrants went on a frenzy of destruction inside apartments on Dalton Avenue near 39th Street. Another duplex on the same street was also damaged when officers used battering rams and hammers to break apart furniture, appliances and bathroom and kitchen fixtures.

D’Antignac’s home is next door to one of the duplexes and was not a target of the raid. Her window was broken by a vacuum cleaner that a police officer threw out the window of an apartment being raided.

“The taxpayers of Los Angeles should be outraged by this settlement,” said Stephen Yagman, the lawyer who represents D’Antignac and the Langs.

He acknowledged that $50,000 is a large amount to compensate a person for a broken window, but said it appeared that the city was eager to settle as a result of the March 3 videotaped beating of Rodney G. King of Altadena by Los Angeles police officers.

“I think the mayor, the City Council and the Police Department are scared to go to trial in this case or any case like it because the public knows from the Rodney King beating for sure how bad the LAPD is,” Yagman said.

Philip Sugar, an assistant city attorney who has worked on all the Dalton lawsuits, denied that the King case had any influence on the city’s decision to settle.

“We had authority from the City Council a week or 10 days before the Rodney King incident,” Sugar said. “We were processing it normally. It was just a coincidence of timing that we got it out today.”

The city made such a large offer, he said, because if the case goes to trial, it is likely to cost the city from $1.5 million to $2 million in outside attorney fees alone.

He said he doubts that another offer will be made to the Langs. The lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in September.