Settlements totaling $4.25 million were reached Wednesday by families of two New Jersey residents killed in 1983 along with 267 other passengers and crew members of Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down by Soviet planes over the Sea of Japan.

The husband and daughter of passenger Kathy Speir of Secaucus, who was 40 at the time of her death, settled their claims for $3 million. The wife and stepdaughter of passenger James Beirn of Piscataway, who was 51 at the time of his death, settled their claims for $1.25 million.

In both cases, the airline will receive credit for the $75,000 it advanced to each family in 1994 after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed a jury verdict that the proximate cause of the plane's destruction was the willful misconduct of Korean Air Lines. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari.

The settlements were reached five days before the scheduled trial before U.S. District Judge Thomas Platt in Brooklyn.

Gerald Baker, who represents both families, filed the two cases in October 1983. The cases were consolidated along with about 100 others for purposes of the liability trial in 1989. After the liability verdict was affirmed, the Circuit Court remanded the individual cases to the district courts to hold damage trials.

"The only thing that I am most upset about is that it took 14 years for the families to obtain justice through our legal system," says Baker, a partner at Baker, Pedersen & Robbins in Hoboken.

KAL attorney Andrew Harakas, a partner at Tompkins, Harakas, Elsasser & Tompkins in White Plains, N.Y., says the settlement is fair. "We've always been negotiating. The plaintiff came down, we went up a little and we reached [a settlement] we thought was good for the airlines and good for the passengers," says Harakas. He says Korean Air was not at fault and that plane's destruction was caused by "the overreaction of the Soviet military."

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