Broken Blue Line
Early last year, Above the Law relayed details of an incident that allegedly took place after the department’s 2007 Christmas party. The alleged events were later to form the basis of a harassment claim against Nielsen and a worker’s compensation disability suit.
According to her testimony in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administrative court this month, Suzie Owsley, the department’s former public information officer, received a text message shortly after the Christmas party, apparently sent from Chief Nielsen’s phone. The message said something along the lines of, “Sorry I was not much fun last night.”
Rather than simply deleting the message, Owsley asked the chief about it the next time she saw him. He claimed not to have sent it. Owsley then proceeded to ask around the office: “Does this make sense to you? How’d this get on my phone?” When she showed it to police dispatcher Tawnie Hansen, Hansen allegedly took the phone and held it for some time, eventually handing it back to Owsley saying she didn’t know what it meant. An hour afterward, Owsley noticed that the message had been deleted.
In the administrative court, Owsley testified that she was reassigned from her position as public information officer shortly after this. In March, a version of the story appeared on the Above the Law blog, along with intimations that Nielsen and Hansen — both of them married to other people — were engaged in an affair. Owsley, who vehemently denied being “Frank Serpico,” said the chief nonetheless held her responsible, and that his retribution escalated.
Owsley, like Wilson, eventually filed a claim against the city for harassment. Theirs weren’t the only administrative claims in Nielsen’s EPD. “There were probably seven or eight ongoing, at one time or another,” said Tyson Monday. Though precise figures in the matter are hard to come by, it would appear that most all of the claims have been rejected.
But Owsley and at least three other current or former employees of the department are still pursuing their complaints at the federal level through the Equal Employment Opportunity Council and the Department of Fair Housing and Employment, which recently sent Owsley a notice of her right to sue the City of Eureka.
On June 9, Owsley took her case to the EEOC’s worker’s compensation appeals board. Representing herself, Owsley testified to an escalating series of events, a chain that somehow led from a seemingly innocuous text message to a cruel and systematic campaign of harassment and retribution that caused her physical and emotional distress, eventually driving her from the department.
Capt. Murl Harpham, a 52-year-veteran of the department, was there to testify, along with Wilson and three other past and present members of the EPD. Harpham, who testified on Owsley’s behalf, said that Nielsen had told him to revise a positive performance review that he had given her last year. Harpham, who felt that Owsley had done a fine job, read from the note Nielsen had given him.
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13 Comments
Comment / By pogo / July 2, 2009, 7:04 a.m.
why would you want to resuscitate malaise? Morale, maybe, but morale is always internal. Maybe you should avoid using French. And stick to short words.
Comment / By Hank Sims / July 2, 2009, 7:16 a.m.
Good point.
Comment / By Mike Goldsby / July 2, 2009, 10:48 p.m.
So this story on the Times Standard website, alleging internet harassment, attracts anonymous comments that eventually cause them all to be taken down?
Is that weird or predictable or sad? I feel like it resuscitated my malaise.
Comment / By Charles / July 3, 2009, 6:15 a.m.
Well, with removal of the last EPD chief, the city looked at bringing someone in who was not a local good ole boy to the city.
They were at war with him from day 1.
Comment / By Kate / July 3, 2009, 3:42 p.m.
Good Ole Boys in Eureka will dig in and be ferocious in order to keep their illegal and immoral activities secret. These people don’t care that poor people and middle class are getting poorer, they only care that they stay in power.
Comment / By Carol Conners / July 4, 2009, 8:08 a.m.
Having been a victim of anonymous blog comments, I find all this quite distasteful. Not your writing about it, Hank, but personal attacks on public figures regarding their private lives. Anyone with a computer can type absolute lies when they are anonymous. A friend of mine sent me a link to the Above the Law blog and I looked at it once. IMHO, it looked politically motivated. I felt like I need to take a shower after reading it. Yuk.
Comment / By Magdeline Pereira / July 4, 2009, 2:51 p.m.
EPD female officers/employees need to be treated with the utmost respect and kindness. Imbecile jokes and pranks from male chiefs, reveal unevolved lowlife exploiters, ejaculators and perpetraitors whos’ DNA need to be eradicated from the human genome.
Comment / By lol / July 5, 2009, 12:49 a.m.
When organizations change there are always people who find themselves unable to change with it. They tend to work themselves out of the organization in time.
I’m certain that this vocal group of anti-Nielson employees will be little missed when they eventually move on. Sorry folks, but if you spend the bulk of your time inciting lawsuits and creating drama within a team unit you are doing a bad job.
No matter how you feel about tactics, behavior or whatever it’s important to act in a professional manner and continue working toward your official job goals. Sabotaging the operations of the PD over petty, small-time fueds regarding a couple of people’s career stagnation is not called for.
Anyone with two brain-cells to rub together can see what’s really going on here.
Comment / By backstabbed / July 5, 2009, 10:51 p.m.
If anyone with a BRAIN had done a real background on Garr he never would have been hired. No one asks why a road deputy was shoved into a closet in a jail and left there until he found another job to go to–YOURS. Geezus, someone opened the door and this clown walked right in.
Comment / By john q public / July 6, 2009, 4:33 p.m.
To backstabbed/aka mcso: Poor baby. Still holding your little immature grudge after all this time. You need counseling bad. You apparently don’t know that it was more than 1 person with a brain who contacted the dept up there & did a background. I bet it really pissed you off when the council down here voted unanimously to give this guy a 5 yr contract because of his good work. You are probably still bringing embarassment to yourself up there. And, by the way, this paper was a little late in their investigating. A grand jury exonerated the chief from all the petty complaints that 2 folks filed, and 1 of them just quit. Get a life, you poor sap.
Comment / By Hank Sims / July 6, 2009, 4:51 p.m.
And, by the way, this paper was a little late in their investigating.
A little early, you mean.
Comment / By john q public / July 6, 2009, 8:47 p.m.
Yes, true, you’re right. NCJ just dredged up, sensationalized & exaggerated old news, did no new creditable research, certainly didn’t get all perspectives, and now they look silly in light of what the grand jury said.
Comment / By magdeline pereira / July 17, 2009, 3:10 p.m.
I nominate Lyn Soderberg for Chief of Police, Eureka, CA and may the Nacho chips fall to the Blessed Peacemakers, USA