Torrance Fires Employee Accused in Noose Incident : Race: Worker, who denies deliberately placing rope above black colleague’s desk, will appeal dismissal.

A white city employee in Torrance, a community that has faced recent allegations of racism, was fired Friday for allegedly placing a hangman’s noose over a black colleague’s desk.

Kathy Keane, assistant to city manager LeRoy Jackson, said she fired Larry Yarbrough, a 14-year employee with a spotless personnel record, after his supervisor, Richard Burtt, concluded that Yarbrough had violated city administrative codes by allegedly dangling a noose of nylon rope over the desk of co-worker Alan Lee on July 27.

In Yarbrough’s termination letter, dated Thursday, Keane called the act “a form of visual harassment” that “created a hostile work environment.”

*

Yarbrough, a 47-year-old water department technician, has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, saying he had tripped over the noose in the office and threw it over his shoulder. It might have accidentally landed on the light fixture over Lee’s desk, he said, or someone else might have put it there.

The case has been a racial flash point in a city that was placed in the spotlight last week after tapes in the O.J. Simpson case revealed that retired Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman had called Torrance “the last middle-class white society” in the Los Angeles area.

Four years ago the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Torrance alleging that its police and fire departments discriminated against minorities in hiring. Since then, Torrance has spent more than $2 million fighting the allegations.

Although the city, 1% of whose residents are African American, has made strides in diversifying its Police Department, the stain of the lawsuit remains.

Now, Yarbrough’s friends and other supporters say, the city is overreacting in an attempt to mend its troubled image, and is using as its scapegoat a man who is not a racist, whose daughter is about to marry a Latino and who helped head a fund-raising drive for a paralyzed black youth at Torrance High School. They point out that Yarbrough came forward after the incident to say he had thrown the rope, and that otherwise city officials would have had no reason to suspect him.

*

“We believe [Yarbrough’s termination] is directly related to the Department of Justice suit,” said his union representative, Guido DeRienzo. “They’re attempting to use a blue-collar employee to show they’re really not like that.”

Yarbrough plans to appeal his termination to the city’s Civil Service Department on Monday, DeRienzo said.

A petition drive launched in Yarbrough’s support has gathered more than 200 signatures.

“I’ve known him for five years and I would think if there was any inkling of him being a racist, I would have picked up on it a long time ago,” said neighbor Liz Gioia. “I’m very keen on that because I’m half Japanese.”

Future son-in-law Hector Rendon wrote a letter of support for his fiancee’s father to City Manager Jackson. “It would have been very difficult to maintain a [six-year] relationship . . . if Mr. Yarbrough was a racist,” Rendon, who is Latino, said in the Aug. 30 letter.

Yarbrough has said racism was the last thing on his mind when he stumbled upon the half-inch-thick yellow cord on the floor of his office July 27. The cord had been a fixture in the office for years, and at one point had been fashioned into a noose to hang a Spuds MacKenzie doll, a marketing character for Bud Light beer, as a joke, according to Yarbrough. A supervisor confirmed that to city officials.

Yarbrough said he tripped over the 20-foot rope on the floor and without looking, pitched it over his shoulder to get it out of the way. He contends that the rope either accidentally landed on the fluorescent light fixture above Lee’s desk or was later placed there by someone else.

Lee could not be reached for comment. Jackson declined to comment, saying city law barred him from discussing any aspect of a personnel matter. And spokesmen for the Compton office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, which often monitors racial issues in Torrance, also were unavailable for comment.

City Engineer Burtt, however, said a subsequent investigation into the incident “did not support” Yarbrough’s claim. Burtt would not elaborate, but Keane’s letter firing Yarbrough indicated water operations administrator Jack Van der Linden had concluded that the rope had been “deliberately placed and adjusted over Mr. Lee’s desk.”

The letter notes that the loop of the noose was hanging three feet over the desk, carefully balanced so that it would stay in place. The letter does not address the possibility that someone else could have placed the noose there.

DeRienzo, who also is the union representative for Lee, contends that city officials fingered Yarbrough because he admitted to tossing the rope during a staff meeting called shortly after Lee discovered the noose.

“We don’t deny the event occurred but we deny Larry Yarbrough committed what they say he did,” DeRienzo said.