Former Allegheny County Jail captain wins nearly $1M verdict in retaliation lawsuit

A federal jury has awarded a former captain at Allegheny County Jail almost $1 million in damages in a lawsuit he said filed after being fired for reporting racist comments by a supervisor.

Jeffrey Kengerski filed suit against the county in August 2017 alleging retaliation. Five years later, after the case had been thrown out but later reinstated by a federal appellate court, it went to trial before U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan.

The trial lasted five days, and the jury returned with its verdict Friday after about four hours of deliberation. The jury awarded Kengerski $400,000 in compensatory damages, $230,528 in back pay and $300,000 in front pay.

The county also must pay Kengerski’s attorney fees, bringing the total award to more than $1.2 million.

The trial included six witnesses, including Warden Orlando Harper, who testified only on cross-examination by attorney Margaret S. Coleman, who represented Kengerski. Harper did not testify in the county’s case about what happened or the reasons for his decisions, Coleman said.

“The law promises employees that they will be protected if they report racism in the workplace,” Coleman said in a news release. “This jury made good on the promise that Allegheny County and Warden (Orlando) Harper broke.”

“I am ecstatic about the verdict. It has been a difficult eight years for me and my family, but I knew that if I didn’t fight back, the harassers would win,” Kengerski, who now works at Butler County Prison, said in the statement.

Allegheny County Solicitor George Janocsko would not say whether the county will appeal.

“We are disappointed in the jury’s decision and are reviewing out options,” he said.

The lawsuit said Kengerski was fired from the jail in November 2015, after reporting a superior officer who called his biracial relative “a monkey.”

The county claimed Kengerski was fired for mishandling a sexual harassment complaint, including allegations that he told two subordinate officers to lie on their reports during the investigation.

However, Kengerski said in his lawsuit that he was fired as retaliation for reporting the behavior of Major Robyn McCall.

Kengerski said McCall asked if Kengerski’s grand-niece was Black and then said Kengerski “will be that guy in the store with a little monkey on his hip like (another employee with a biracial child).”

Kengerski asked McCall not to speak that way and left the room. Afterward, he received several text messages — most of them memes with offensive racial stereotypes in them.

He reported McCall’s comments to Harper, and she was placed on administrative leave in May 2015. She retired three months later.

After Kengerski reported McCall, he said he was harassed by other employees, who made racist phone calls to him at work, threatened him physically and accused him of misconduct.

Kengerski was then fired based on the false allegations from his subordinates, Coleman said.

At trial, the jury heard evidence that Kengerski was treated differently than McCall, whose three months of leave were paid, Coleman said. Kengerski was physically removed from the jail and was terminated by a one-line letter from Harper after 13 years of working there.

After the lawsuit was filed, Ranjan granted a motion for summary judgment filed by the county, which claimed Kengerski could not support a retaliation claim because in his complaint to the warden, he was not opposing any protected activity.

However, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year disagreed and allowed the lawsuit to move forward.