A federal judge in South Carolina has dismissed the $3.5 million racial discrimination lawsuit filed by a former employee of the security provider at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site.
U.S. District Judge Sherri Lydon ruled May 28 that plaintiff Marcialena Tremble Brown missed the deadline to file her case against her former employer, Centerra-SRS.
Brown was fired from her job as a security officer on May 20, 2015, 18 days after she left her firearm unattended in a restroom. The judge ruled Brown should have filed her initial complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) within 300 days of being dismissed.
Brown, who is African-American, claims the 300-day clock should not start until Nov. 1, 2018. That is when she learned another employee of a different race did the same thing but received only a warning. Based on Supreme Court precedent, the termination clearly starts the timetable for any discrimination claim, the judge held.
The plaintiff did not file her initial claim with the EEOC until April 11, 2016, which was not within the 300-day time limit. The judge ruled in a seven-page decision that Brown considered her initial action to be a discrimination case, so the plaintiff’s failure to file within the deadline “bars her claim.” After the EEOC rejected her action in December 2018, Brown then filed the complaint with the U.S. District Court in July 2019.
In November, Centerra and certain company managers named in the suit filed a motion asking the court to dismiss Brown’s case based on the federal court pleadings.
On Jan. 30, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paige Gossett filed a report recommending the federal court dismiss Brown’s case. The U.S. District Court judge then considered the parties’ objections to the magistrate’s recommendations. The plaintiff filed objections to the magistrate’s report on Feb. 27. Both the plaintiff and defendants filed responses to the magistrate’s report in February.
Lydon said the plaintiff’s only objection centers around the magistrate report’s heavy reliance on the initial complaint with the EEOC. A footnote in the decision says Brown started out representing herself and did not retain an attorney until September 2019.
But discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 must first be filed with the EEOC within 300 days of the alleged employment practice that violated the act, which is the termination, the judge said. The plaintiff missed the deadline, so the judge adopted the magistrate’s report and dismissed the case against the defendants.
