ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A former City of Allentown employee says she was fired by Mayor Mat Tuerk for being outspoken about racial and ethnic discrimination within the city’s workforce.<\/p>\n
Karen Ocasio has filed a civil lawsuit over the matter.<\/p>\n
Ocasio is the third Allentown employee to file a discrimination lawsuit against the city in three months.<\/p>\n
Her attorney says this latest lawsuit is the second half of one filed in October.<\/p>\n
In the 11-page lawsuit, Ocasio claims Mayor Matt Tuerk considered her a troublemaker and fired her for speaking out about racism and discrimination.<\/p>\n
Ocasio claims she was the only non-Caucasian working in the city’s HR department and was subjected to racial and ethnic hostility and disparate treatment.<\/p>\n
And that she went on medical leave because of the stress it was allegedly causing.<\/p>\n
She claims when she returned, she was demoted.<\/p>\n
“This is really the second half of the Nadeem Shazad case,” said Attorney Marc Weinstein.<\/p>\n
Nadeem Shazad is the former HR Director for the city of Allentown who filed a lawsuit against the city in October claiming Mayor Tuerk called him ageist and racist slurs and allegedly forced him to resign.<\/p>\n
“He says the mayor fired him because he wouldn’t fire Karen Ocasio and Karen Ocasio, who is the plaintiff in the second case, is someone who had brought discrimination cases against the city,” said Weinstein.<\/p>\n
Weinstein is the attorney for Ocasio, Shahzad and a third employee who filed a suit against the city, Tawanna Whitehead.<\/p>\n
Ocasio took her concerns to city council in September of 2023 urging them to investigate.<\/p>\n
“I just want to emphasize that there is a lot of people who are going through stuff here and we have to have this investigation happen,” said Ocasio.<\/p>\n
At the time, Mayor Tuerk was in full support of the idea.<\/p>\n
“Just grab a vote right now and preferably it’s 7 to nothing to initiate your investigation,” said Tuerk.<\/p>\n
But after City Council voted to hire former FBI Agent Scott Curtis to investigate, the mayor claimed Curtis was hired improperly and refused to hire him.<\/p>\n
Ultimately the city settled with Curtis and took possession of all of his investigative materials.<\/p>\n
Weinstein says the Curtis report and investigative materials could be important to the discrimination lawsuits.<\/p>\n
A judge has ordered those materials be released to Weinstein who says he will make them public.<\/p>\n
The city has appealed their release.<\/p>\n
When asked about the Ocasio lawsuit and the appeal of the judge\u2019s decision a city spokesperson said the city does not comment on active litigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A former City of Allentown employee says she was fired by Mayor Mat Tuerk for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63141,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,24966,2112,33820,1021,33817,2676,33816,33818,33819],"class_list":{"0":"post-63140","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-civil-lawsuit","12":"tag-discrimination","13":"tag-ethnic-hostility","14":"tag-investigation","15":"tag-karen-ocasio","16":"tag-lawsuit","17":"tag-mayor-mat-tuerk","18":"tag-nadeem-shazad","19":"tag-racial-hostility"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}