A slip of paper slid under Gary Evangelista’s office door at the Camden Housing Authority — a document that showed a tenant owed the agency $10,000 in unpaid rent. Evangelista, a retired police officer who oversaw security, was puzzled. Instead of being evicted, as policy required, the woman had been moved into another unit. So, Evangelista flagged the discrepancy to the top.
That episode was one of several times over the course of a year that Evangelista and a colleague, Kaberia Fussell, brought reports of possible wrongdoing inside the agency — including allegations of theft, fraud, and favoritism — to its highest officials, according to a lawsuit they later filed.
But rather than investigating, the lawsuit said, the housing authority fired Evangelista and Fussell in 2018.
The two challenged their terminations in federal court, arguing that the housing authority had violated their First Amendment right to free speech without retaliation.
And last week, after a five-year legal battle in federal court in Camden, a jury agreed, awarding Evangelista and Fussell a combined $1.7 million.
It was unclear Wednesday whether the Camden Housing Authority and three officials named as defendants in the lawsuit — Victor Figueroa, its former executive director; Katheryn Blackshear, its former deputy executive director; and Debbie Person-Polk, chair of its board of commissioners — would appeal the jury’s verdict. Attorneys for the agency did not respond to calls and emails.
Evangelista and Fussell’s lawyer, Joseph Guzzardo, said his clients are “good people” who were wrongfully terminated for “doing the right thing.”
In all, Evangelista and Fussell, who worked as a housing specialist, brought at least five allegations of illicit activity to officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the lawsuit, including an employee scheme to steal scrap metal from housing villages and reports of sexual harassment against a tenant.
They were fired on Dec. 19, 2018.
“My reputation was ruined,” Evangelista said in an interview this week.
Fussell, a union employee, successfully appealed her termination and returned to the agency. But Evangelista, a nonunion employee, could not appeal. He said he struggled to find steady employment.
The verdict, he said, “gave me my life back after six years.”
Fussell still works at the housing authority. Even so, before the verdict, “I still felt like a loser, even though I did nothing wrong. Because when you’re fired, people look at you like, ‘What did you do?’” Fussell said.
But now, she said, “I feel vindicated.”
