GIRL ACCEPTS SETTLEMENT FOR ATTACK HAMMER WAS USED IN INCIDENT.

Byline: KAREN MAESHIRO Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- A civil lawsuit filed by a Palmdale teenage girl who was attacked with a hammer by a phone repairman has been resolved with a confidential settlement.

The girl, who now lives out of state, received a settlement agreed to by all the parties, but terms were confidential, her attorney said.

``She's doing much better. It's something she will always have to deal with and live with,'' attorney Mitchell Stein said. ``She's getting along better and doing the best she can.''

The girl filed the lawsuit in November 2005 against then-repairman Gregory Franks, the San Bernardino company he worked for, and Frontier Homes, the developer of the home where the incident occurred.

Franks is serving an eight-year prison sentence and upon his release must register as a sex offender for the November 2004 hammer attack on the girl, then 17, at a home where he was sent on a telephone-repair call. He was accused of hitting the girl in the head with a hammer, grabbing her and telling her, ``Just kiss me.''

The girl got the hammer away from him, scratched him, and screamed as she eventually escaped and ran out the front door, according to the lawsuit.

Franks also was charged in another assault in which a 32-year-old female acquaintance was threatened with a hammer at a house in Lancaster in June 2004.

Franks was sentenced to prison in November 2005 after he withdrew his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and pleaded no contest to two counts of assault with intent to commit rape after prosecutors agreed to dismiss additional charges.