2 DWP Employees File Bias Suit

LOS ANGELES —  Two Department of Water and Power employees said Thursday their supervisors discriminated against them because they have African American wives.

Kenneth Carter and Augustine Serna said in a lawsuit filed in Superior Court that they received death threats after testifying in a 1998 internal investigation about alleged racial discrimination by the DWP. The men are seeking an unspecified amount of damages from the city and the DWP.

The DWP declined to comment. During a news conference on Thursday, Carter, a 41-year-old mechanic who is white, said co-workers joked with him before the Martin Luther King holiday last year that they should kill another African American to get another day off work.

“My response was, ‘Which one of my kids would you like to kill for another holiday?’ ” Carter said. He said he then became the target of racial jokes and threats after DWP employees learned that his wife is African American.

Augustine Serna, a 44-year-old Latino electrical craft helper, said that while on a lunch break with his wife, a supervisor told him that another employee had reported he was in a conference room with a “black hooker.”

Serna and Carter said they went on administrative leave with pay in April after receiving death threats. In November they were taken off administrative leave and began drawing payments from the DWP’s disability fund.