A judge Wednesday sharply pared a lawsuit against Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center by a Black nurse who survived a hospital shooting in the 1990s in Riverside County, dismissing her racial and disability discrimination as well as her harassment claims.
Pomona Superior Court Judge Salvatore Sirna ruled that plaintiff Elizabeth T. Baker can move forward only with her causes of action for intentional and negative infliction of emotional distress.
Hospital lawyers maintained in their court papers that all of Baker’s claims were barred by the statute of limitations. A hospital spokeswoman previously released a statement regarding the suit, saying PVHMC “is an equal opportunity employer that does not tolerate any form of workplace harassment.”
Baker was a victim of gun violence while employed as a nurse at Corona Regional Medical Center on Aug. 9, 1993, her suit filed Nov. 18 states. According to a published report at the time, a distraught woman with a gun walked into the Riverside County hospital’s nursery, shot a nurse who she followed toward the emergency room and shot her again before being stopped by another nurse who disarmed the gun-wielding intruder.
The gunshot wounds Baker suffered in the 1993 incident left her with physical and mental injuries that still persist, the suit states.
Baker was hired as an obstetrics nurse at PVHMC in October 2003 and assigned to the Labor Delivery Recovery Postpartum Department in the hospital’s Women’s Center, her suit states.
Starting in 2005, a charge nurse began to disparage Baker, who is Black, about her appearance and made bets with the plaintiff’s co-workers about whether Baker’s hair was real or “had to be a wig or a weave,” the suit states.
During Baker’s work breaks, the same charge nurse allegedly would ask the plaintiff racist questions, including whether all Black people eat watermelon and fried chicken and if they shake pepper all over their food before they taste it, the suit states.
In another incident, a Baker supervisor confronted the plaintiff about her medical leave subsequent to her having thyroid surgery, saying, “Why didn’t you have your surgery done when you were off the last time, you keep abandoning all your coworkers, you’re going to end up getting fired,” according to the suit.
Baker consulted with PVHMC’s human resources department for advice regarding the issues she was having with the charge nurse and others, but nothing substantive was done, her suit states.
Baker was fired in November 2019 “under the false pretext of forgery, among other pretextual reasons,” the suit alleges.