Four former controllers at the East Los Angeles office of Southern California Gas Co. are suing the utility, alleging their managers misused security cameras to watch homeless people nearby engaging in intimate behavior as well as using drugs.
Kenneth Huber, Brad Buddy, Francisco Lopez and Kyle Nelson are the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that alleges retaliation, harassment and failure to prevent discrimination and harassment. The four seek unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, including those to compensate them for emotional distress as well as lost wages and benefits.
A SoCalGas representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit filed Thursday.
According to the suit, the SoCalGas facility that housed the gas control room was a secured building with both stationary and movable security cameras that monitored activities outside the facility in order to alert employees of possible threats.
Control room employees had access and control over the cameras and three bosses, including the plaintiffs’ supervisor, abused the privilege daily by using the camera controls to zoom in on “sexual, vulgar and inappropriate images” immediately outside of the facility, the suit alleges.
As an example, the supervisors zoomed in on unhoused people masturbating on the streets, having sex in their cars and engaging in intravenous drug use, the suit states. Plaintiff Buddy contends that the trio’s boss had an obsession with a homeless woman camped nearby and played images of her sleeping, eating, changing, using drugs and relieving herself, the suit further alleges.
The supervisors also sexually harassed a female controller who is not a plaintiff and they repeatedly boasted about their sexual escapades to the plaintiffs and other control room employees, the suit states. A manager later admitted to the four plaintiffs that he believed that assigning a woman to the team would make the three bosses “less harassing, vulgar and profane,” according to the complaint.
The supervisors called Buddy a “gay race car driver” because he wore driving gloves to work and they openly teased a Black employee because of his race, the suit further states.
The plaintiffs complained about the working environment and were fired in retaliation for doing so in May 2024, according to the suit, which further states that plaintiff Nelson thought he was being called into a human resources meeting to hear management’s plan for correcting the problems and instead found himself out of a job.