Mother’s Suit Against Ex-Employer Tells of Strohmeyer’s Past

The mother of the teenager accused of 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--made a year ago--are contained in an Orange County Superior Court lawsuit accusing the Irvine firm, which makes 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.

Her son, Jeremy, was arrested on charges of murdering Sherrice Iverson in May of this year in a bathroom of the Prima Donna casino on the California-Nevada border while her father gambled.

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

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

In her suit, Winifred 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 she 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 suit’s allegations that its corporate culture is biased against older women.

The lawsuit does not describe in detail Jeremy Strohmeyer’s problems, and Garrity declined to elaborate beyond saying that they involved school and discipline. Garrity said that Jeremy may have been predisposed to problems but that the Singapore experience clearly set them off.

Some fellow students who knew Strohmeyer in Long Beach have said he 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 Winifred Strohmeyer in Singapore.

While in Singapore, Winifred 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 could not 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 employee, Barbara Anderson, contend that they were victims of a downsizing at headquarters that fell disproportionately on women, especially those over age 40.

Three-quarters of Western Digital’s employees are male, but two-thirds of those laid off were older women, the suit says. Cornelius, the Western Digital counsel, said some of the charges stem from misinterpreted “water cooler talk” and “stray comments.”

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.

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