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After repeated complaints about supervisor, a tragic end

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Brian Cooper, a regional manager for Atlanta-based Home Depot USA Inc., “had a history of sexually harassing his young female subordinates,” said the March 24 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in Sherry Anicich v. Home Depot USA Inc. et al.

Although subordinate Alisha Bromfield, who had worked at various Home Depot garden centers in northern Illinois for six years, “complained repeatedly” about him to other supervisors and managers, he remained her supervisor, according to the ruling. Then in 2012, when Ms. Bromfield was 21 and about seven months pregnant with someone else’s baby, Mr. Cooper began asking her to go to his sister’s wedding in Wisconsin. She refused.

“Then, invoking the authority the defendants had entrusted to him as a supervisor, he told her he would fire her or reduce her hours if she did not go,” said the ruling.

She went, and after the wedding Mr. Cooper took her to the hotel room he had rented for the two of them and repeated his request for her to be in a relationship with him, which she again refused.

“Cooper strangled her to death. He then raped her corpse,” said the ruling.

Mr. Cooper was sentenced to two life terms for killing Ms. Bromfield and her unborn daughter.

Ms. Bromfield’s mother, Sherry Anicich, who lives in Plainfield, Illinois, filed suit, charging the defendants with negligence in connection with her daughter’s death.

Also named as defendants in the case were Grand Service L.L.C. and Grand Flower Growers Inc., based in Wayland, Michigan, which managed garden centers for Home Depot stores. All three defendants jointly employed Mr. Cooper as a regional manager, according to the ruling.

None of the companies responded to requests for comment.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit reinstated the case after it was dismissed by the U.S. District Court in Chicago. “To succeed on a claim for negligent hiring, supervision, or retention, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the employee’s ‘particular unfitness rendered the plaintiff’s injury foreseeable,’” said the ruling, in addressing the arguments of one of the defendants and quoting an earlier case. The amended complaint recounts how Cooper’s behavior escalated: from private inappropriate comments and touching, to workplace retaliation, to continual harassment and monitoring, and finally to public outbursts, verbal abuse, and physical intimidation.

“Hearing such evidence, a reasonable jury could easily find that the employers could and should have foreseen that Cooper would take the small further step to violence,” the ruling said.

Observers stress that at this stage of the litigation, the court has accepted all the plaintiff’s allegations as true.

 

 

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