By Rong-Gong Lin II
The Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — It wasn't just that his fellow firefighters put dog food in his spaghetti at a fire station and watched him eat it, laughing.

It was what happened in the months after former Los Angeles Firefighter Tennie Pierce reported the incident that led him to sue his department for racial harassment, Pierce and his lawyer said at a forum Saturday in Leimert Park.

"As I've always said about this case, it's the retaliation, stupid," said lawyer Genie Harrison. "The dog food incident was really the catalyst. Mr. Pierce would still be on the Fire Department ... if there had not been the retaliation."

The Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable came four months after the City Council voted to pay Pierce nearly $1.5 million to settle the suit. He retired as part of the settlement.

The case stemmed from an October 2004 incident.

In his suit, Pierce said a fire captain had bought canned dog food that was mixed into Pierce's dinner by another firefighter at a Westchester station.

Pierce's suit also contended that for more than a year afterward he was subjected to "verbal slurs, insults [and] derogatory remarks," including taunts by firefighters "barking like dogs [and] asking him how dog food tasted."

People who had known him for years stopped talking to him, Pierce said. Other firefighters were subsequently confrontational and verbally abusive to Pierce on firefighting assignments, Harrison said.

"The department really never had my back in this ordeal," Pierce told the largely African American audience of about 30.

Pierce got a mostly favorable reaction at the forum.

Inglewood resident Le Roy Marshall found what Pierce went through an example of "treating us like we don't belong." Marshall, like Pierce, is black.

Moderator Lita Herron said she recalled how her father had brought in his own food as an L.A. firefighter in the 1940s and '50s to prevent white colleagues from tampering with his meals.

But some attendees were skeptical of the seriousness of the incident.

"I resent my [taxpayer] money being taken by this silly trivial stunt," Tut Hayes of South Los Angeles said.

Public anger should be directed toward fire officials, who were warned more than a decade ago about systemic racial discrimination in the department, he added.

The Los Angeles Times