Jury Trial Sought In Berlin EMS Case

BERLIN — There was some movement this month in the ongoing $8 million civil suit filed against the Berlin Fire Company alleging malfeasance from leadership over a former employee’s perceived sexual orientation, including the winnowing of the list of individual defendants from four to two and a demand for a jury trial.

In August, former Berlin firefighter and EMT Zachary Tyndall, through his attorney James Otway, filed suit in U.S. District Court, alleging a long pattern of harassment and intimidation carried out by the department’s leaders over his perceived sexual orientation. The suit, which originally named as defendants Chief Bryon Trimble, Assistant Chief Derrick Simpson, BFC President David Fitzgerald and former EMS Supervisor Norris Donohoe, Jr., is seeking $2 million in compensatory damages and another $6 million in punitive damages.

The suit alleges the BFC and the named individual defendants carried out a “deliberate and conscious effort” to harass and intimidate Tyndall, driving Tyndall to quit the department he had been a full-time employee of since 2008 and a cadet since he was 14 years old.
In early December, the U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor in part on a motion to dismiss the case filed by the BFC and the named individual defendants, but ruled against the motion in other facets of the case. Essentially, the federal court judge said the original complaint was unspecific about the nature of the individual defendants’ roles in the various episodes of abuse.
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