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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Hope he wins big!
ReplyDeleteAnyone familiar with what's really going on in Berlin knows this is a waste of time. One of the employees failed a psychiatric exam for employment by MSP and a local fire department. The other young man constantly play himself off as gay and laughed about it. They saw money and set out to cash in. Not an uncommon practice these days. You would have to be on the inside to fully understand what the true story is.
ReplyDeleteYou would have to be on the inside to fully understand what the true story is.
ReplyDeleteJanuary 3, 2014 at 12:05 PM
Perhaps, but the trial will do that. Does not matter who failed what or why. The trial will show that too. If someone says to stop harassing them, laughing or no, then it should stop. Or you will have trials such as this.
If nothing else, I hope this trial educates some people on how to act towards others and how to behave in a supposedly professional agency.