Casino Slaying Suspect’s Behavior Blamed on Firm

The mother of a teenager accused of raping and killing a 7-year-old Los Angeles girl in a Nevada casino blames mistreatment by her former employer, Western Digital Corp., for pushing her son into behavioral problems.

The allegations are contained in an Orange County Superior Court lawsuit accusing the Irvine maker of computer disk drives of sex and age discrimination. The company will vigorously dispute the charges when trial begins Monday, a spokesman said.

Winifred Strohmeyer, 53, of Long Beach, once Western Digital’s director of compensation and benefits, filed the suit in July 1996, three months after the company laid her off.

It was 10 months before her son, Jeremy, was arrested on charges of murdering Sherrice Iverson in a restroom of the Primadonna casino on the California-Nevada border while her father gambled.

In her suit, Strohmeyer says Jeremy “began having problems as a result of having to adjust to different schools, cultures and systems” when she was transferred from Irvine to a human relations job in Singapore in January 1995 for what was supposed to be a six-month stint.

The company later extended the stay, forcing Jeremy to transfer to a new school, according to the suit. It says Western Digital then insisted that Strohmeyer remain in Singapore while her son and husband returned home from January to April, 1996.

“He was without a mother for four months,” said Strohmeyer’s lawyer, Peggy Garrity of Santa Monica.

Western Digital corporate counsel Michael A. Cornelius said the company “strongly denies” the allegations in the suit and that its corporate culture is biased against older women.

The lawsuit doesn’t describe in detail Jeremy Strohmeyer’s problems, and Garrity declined to elaborate beyond saying they involved school and discipline. Garrity said Jeremy, who was adopted at 18 months, may have been predisposed to problems but that the Singapore experience clearly set them off.

Some students who knew Strohmeyer in Long Beach have said he had changed from a good student and hard-working member of the volleyball team to an erratic youth who drank heavily at parties.

The suit says the problems were aggravated by Western Digital’s refusal to let the family stay with Strohmeyer in Singapore.

While in Singapore, Strohmeyer was told that she would eventually have to take a lesser position in Rochester, Minn., or be laid off the following April, the suit says.

It says she declined the job in part because “it would have been too difficult on her son who was already having serious problems as a result of Singapore.”

She was laid off in April 1996, but received an offer to work at Beckman Instruments in Fullerton that September.

The suit says she turned the offer down, largely because her son’s problems were so severe that he couldn’t handle transferring to yet another school.

Strohmeyer believes the entire sequence of events was Western Digital’s way of easing her out, Garrity said.

In the suit, Strohmeyer and another former Western Digital executive, Barbara Anderson, 50, contend that they were victims of a downsizing at headquarters that fell disproportionately on women, especially those older than 40. They say they were replaced in their jobs by men in their 20s and 30s. While three-quarters of Western Digital’s employees are male, two-thirds of those laid off were older women, the suit says.

Anderson, a domestic tax manager with a master’s degree in business taxation, was paid less than younger white men in comparable positions, the suit contends.

The suit says Anderson was excluded from all-male meetings and was passed over for promotion to international tax manager in favor of a 27-year-old white man with no master’s degree and far less experience.

According to the lawsuit, Strohmeyer had often protested Western Digital’s treatment of women and its decision not to fire a male employee who was sued for sexual harassment.

The suit says Charles Haggerty, Western Digital’s chief executive, disliked her as a result of her complaints, and that her immediate boss, Scott Hughes, explained her layoff by saying Haggerty disliked her.

Cornelius, the Western Digital counsel, declined to rebut the charges individually, saying they will be dealt with in court. However, he said some of them stem from misinterpreted “water cooler talk” and “stray comments.”

He added that Haggerty has actually led the fight for gender and race diversity in the workplace. “We’re really saddened . . . that this suit misstates that issue.” In a deposition, Haggerty said he respected Strohmeyer’s work and couldn’t remember saying he disliked her, although he found her attitude too “negative” at times.

The suit seeks unspecified actual and punitive damages. Garrity estimated that Strohmeyer’s actual losses could total $1.5 million.

Heavy demand for Western Digital’s desktop computer-memory products has pushed sales to an all-time high, the company said last week. It reported a record profit of $267.6 million for fiscal 1997.

Also last week, Western Digital promoted Kathryn A. Braun, 46, to president of its personal storage division, which accounted for $14 billion in sales last year, about 90% of the company’s total revenue.

According to documents filed with the lawsuit, Haggerty once required Braun to attend a “charm school for executives” so she would be less aggressive--a requirement not made of any male employee.

An Aug. 30 preliminary hearing is scheduled in Jean, Nev., for Jeremy Strohmeyer on murder and kidnapping charges. However, a grand jury starts hearing evidence Tuesday and could indict him, sending the case directly to trial.

Jeremy Strohmeyer’s attorney, Leslie Abramson, declined to comment on the criminal case or on Winifred Strohmeyer’s lawsuit against Western Digital.