Former Sandy Interim Chief of Police Sean Lundry has filed to sue the city of Sandy, Mayor Stan Pulliam, City Manager Tyler Deems and Deputy City Manager Jeff Aprati.
The lawsuit is a complaint of unlawful retaliation, wrongful discharge and civil rights violations.
The suit claims that the defendants “smeared Lundry through a campaign of public, highly stigmatizing commentary falsely asserting that Lundry had engaged in criminal and/or workplace misconduct,” then denied him a hearing and opportunity to clear his name.
As such, Lundry alleges he was denied due process “which he was entitled to under the SPD manual and federal constitutional law.”
The suit also alleges that the defendants retaliated against Lundry for exercising his First Amendment rights, by “organizing private citizens’ questioning and criticism of City leadership’s decision-making processes relating to the police chief search; and (2) directly criticizing City leadership himself on social media.”
The suit also claims that Deems and the city engaged in whistleblower retaliation by placing him on leave, investigating him and ultimately firing him after Lundry questioned “Deems and the City’s misuse of SPD funds to pay for the police chief recruitment process,” and “discussing the activities of the City and its senior officials — namely, Deems, Aprati and Pulliam — with the City Council President, a member of the elected governing body of the City.”
Finally, the suit also alleges that the termination of Lundry from his city of Sandy employment was an act of wrongful discharge.
Aside from aiming to bring action against the defendants for alleged violations of Oregon law, Lundry also hopes to “recover compensatory damages for back pay, lost income and lost retirement benefits in an amount to be proved at trial but presently estimated at no less than $1.2 million and compensatory damages for emotional distress in an amount to be proved at trial,” as well as recover his reasonable attorney’s fees and litigation costs.
For context
Lundry was placed on administrative leave in February pending an investigation by OSP and the city of Sandy. On May 22, Deems notified Lundry via an official letter that because of the results of the city’s investigation, the city intended to terminate his employment.
While the report after the OSP investigation into charges of destroying public records concluded that “there was no substantiating evidence that public records were destroyed in violation of city policy or Oregon’s public records law,” Deems found enough cause within the 209-page report provided by the city’s third-party investigator to terminate Lundry’s employment.
“This was not my choice,” Lundry told The Post following his termination. “The city’s decision to terminate me was made without providing me any meaningful opportunity to defend myself or publicly assert my innocence. There is a bigger story here. I look forward to clearing my name.”
In response to Deems’ letter, Lundry sent a rebuttal via letter, which he followed up on July 16 with an official tort claim notice, which has now officially been filed.
In his notice letter, Lundry’s legal representation from Bradley Bernstein and Sands, informed the city administrators that the tort claim would be filed for “your indefensible, serial violations of (Lundry’s) rights and the damages he has — and will continue — to suffer as a result of your conduct.”
The notice gave the city until Aug. 16 to resolve the dispute “to (Lundry’s) satisfaction,” or else prompt him to file the suit and seek damages.
The complaint filed on Wednesday, Aug. 28, claims that the lawsuit aims to “remedy a pattern of unlawful and unconstitutional conduct that resulted in a baseless criminal investigation and, ultimately, (Lundry’s) wrongful termination from the City of Sandy.”
“In service of their own narrow personal and political agendas, the Defendants baselessly investigated, disciplined, retaliated against, and ultimately terminated Lundry’s employment,” the complaint alleges.
The suit further claims that the defendants’ conduct didn’t only end his career with Sandy Police Department, but also “permanently tarnished his reputation and continues to cause him to suffer damages to this day.”
New information, new claims
In recounting Lundry’s law enforcement career and events leading up to the termination of his employment with Sandy, the suit claims that in his former capacity as interim chief, Lundry “discovered that Deems and the City had used approximately $30,000 from SPD’s general budget to pay for GMP Consultants’ work.”
Lundry believed this was a misuse of departmental funds, and brought the issue to the attention of the city’s accounting staff, saying it was “inconsistent with how City leadership had represented that the search would be paid for,” and asking that “they reverse the transaction, instead use the City funding that had been allocated for the police chief search process, and return the $30,000 in funds to SPD.”
The accounting staff, according to Lundry’s account, told him to bring the issue to Deems, who allegedly “declined to return the funds to SPD.”
The suit says Lundry later brought the issue to Council President (and now mayoral candidate) Laurie Smallwood.
The suit further alleges that after multiple community members made public records requests to obtain files related to the first police chief recruitment process and the comment cards submitted during that process, “City leaders began scrambling to find some way to discredit Lundry — the superior candidate for the position of Chief, and the one who had garnered the most public support — and to justify their decision to instead hire an out-of-state candidate with a dubious background and no knowledge of the Sandy community.”
According to the lawsuit’s laid-out timeline, on Feb. 1, Deems met with Lundry and asked him why he had changed his title in his email signature line, from interim chief back to lieutenant, and inquired about his willingness to still serve as interim.
“Lundry made clear that he would continue serving as Interim Chief and clarified that he had changed his signature line only in recognition of the fact that the City had identified someone else as its next Chief of Police,” the lawsuit reads.
In this meeting, Lundry said that Deems also asked about a rumor (which was looked into by the third-party city investigation into Lundry) that Lundry had said he would fly to Utah to punch former police chief candidate Gary Jensen. Lundry alleges in the suit that “Deems admitted he knew there was no truth to the rumor, which was absurd on its face.”
According to the report from the city’s investigation, there was substantiating and corroborating evidence to show that Lundry had made threats of violence in the workplace, specifically about “going to Utah to punch Gary Jensen, a (former) candidate for the city’s police chief position.”
“The report noted that it was said in front of several employees but that the staff who heard this comment thought it was said in a ‘lighthearted or joking manner that they did not take seriously,’” Deems wrote in his May letter to Lundry. “The report indicates that the comments were made in multiple settings: the Police Department report writing room, and around the campfire at the department holiday party. Regardless of your intent behind this statement, this type of language is a clear violation of Sandy Police Department Policy 319.5.8 (e) and City of Sandy Policy V. H., which is detailed later in this letter.”
In consequent conversations with Lundry during the investigation regarding these allegations, Deems also claimed that the narrative from Lundry on these topics seemed to change.
“Whether the comment was said ‘in jest’ or not is irrelevant at this point,” Deems wrote in his May 22 letter. “The larger issue here is the contradicting (sic) statements between two employees and yourself. The discrepancies between what employees heard you say, what you said to the investigator, and what you said to me lead me to believe that you were not forthcoming during the investigation and have more than likely been untruthful.”
Perceived retaliation
On the topic of Lundry’s administrative leave and investigations by the city and OSP, the lawsuit says both were inspired by “a single, stale comment – that was clearly biased and comprised 25 anonymously written words.”
“The defendants chose to initiate a baseless criminal investigation of Lundry, referring him to the Oregon State Police to be investigated for destruction of public records and official misconduct,” the suit claims. “The defendants did so despite the fact that the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office, in reviewing the comment cards to determine whether they were releasable public records, had seen no basis for investigating Lundry.”
The lawsuit further alleges that the defendants “suddenly changed course” by using one of the anonymous comment cards released to the public as basis for launching two investigations into Lundry. In the lawsuit documents Lundry names the employee he believes to have written the comment.
Lundry alleges that these employees (who will remain nameless) were against him becoming chief and held grudges against him after he admonished them for acts he deemed “petty” and after he filed a formal complaint against one of them “after discovering — in the course of requesting proof of crime reporting from the records department as part of a reaccreditation process — that (they) had incorrectly been treating Oregon’s mandatory crime-reporting obligations as voluntary.”
“As a result of Lundry’s efforts to address their workplace misconduct, (the employees) were staunchly opposed to Lundry becoming Police Chief, and the City relied on (one of the employee’s) baseless complaint against Lundry despite knowing that (they) held a specific bias against him,” the suit claims.
Allegations concerning current mayor, Stan Pulliam, in the lawsuit claim that the mayor pressured his peers to “abandon their support for Lundry based on the supposedly ‘new information’ that Defendants claimed to have discovered regarding Lundry, telling them to ‘get right’ — meaning to get on board with the City’s flawed decision to hire Jensen.”
“Pulliam had a preexisting bias against Lundry, who he believed did not support his vision for the City of Sandy; for example, Pulliam was upset that Lundry did not support ‘branding’ SPD vehicles with the City’s logo, and he was upset that Lundry disagreed with his (Pulliam’s) desire to aggressively police and arrest unhoused people who had committed no crimes,” the lawsuit alleges.
As of noon Thursday, Aug. 29, Pulliam said he was unaware of the lawsuit, having not received notice himself, and declined to comment at the time.
Prior to this lawsuit, members of the People for Sandy PAC, which has been vocally supportive of Lundry, alleged that Pulliam “was not happy with (Sean) Lundry’s use of branding on the police vehicles that he did not approve of” and that “it appeared that this influence may have come from a place of the mayor personally not wanting (Sean) Lundry as chief.”
In response, Pulliam said at the time (for an article that appeared in the July 10 edition of The Post): “I never would put my support or not behind someone for a promotion over a disagreement.”
That said, Lundry’s lawsuit claims that “Pulliam had, throughout the police chief recruitment process, been telling others that he was determined to prevent Lundry from becoming police chief as long as he was mayor — even though, on paper, the ultimate hiring decision fell to Deems as City Manager.”
The Post reached out to the city, namely Deems and Aprati, to offer the opportunity for comment on the lawsuit but did not receive a response before publication time of this article.
“The Defendants’ campaign against Lundry has unfortunately succeeded – by wrongly investigating him and ultimately terminating his employment, the Defendants have prevented him from obtaining the role of Chief that he had earned,” the suit concludes. “Not only that, by repeatedly and falsely dragging him through the mud, they have prevented him from obtaining any employment as a law enforcement officer. In addition, the Defendants’ false narrative regarding Lundry — a 20-year law enforcement officer with an unblemished record of service — has now taken hold in the Sandy community and beyond. The Defendants’ false, disparaging comments regarding Lundry have been reposted and circulated widely, unjustly and irreparably damaging Lundry’s reputation.”
The Post will publish updates regarding this case as new information becomes available.
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