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A Danville man who has been lauded for his advocacy against impaired driving after two of his young kids were killed in 2003 sued his now-former employer in Livermore last week alleging discrimination, harassment and wrongful termination in the wake of his manager pestering him about alcohol and drug use.
According to the unverified complaint for damages filed in Alameda County Superior Court on Tuesday, Bob Pack is suing the Livermore branch of Orkin, a pest control service where Pack worked as a salesperson. Orkin is a subsidiary of the global company Rollins, Inc., which is also named as a defendant in the complaint, as is the branch manager Darren Jerdonek.
Among the many allegations, Pack’s lawyer Judith Wolff states in the complaint that Jerdonek repeatedly accosted Pack asking if he drinks and accused Pack of drinking and being high on marijuana on the job — all while knowing about Pack’s history of having two of his children killed by a driver high on opioids and drunk on a sidewalk in Danville. Pack claims he was fired last year for retaliatory reasons.
“It is one of the most egregious cases of bullying that I have ever seen in more than 30 years of practicing law, where a 38-year-old manager bullied a 68-year-old employee whom he knew to be emotionally fragile, for the specific purpose of getting a rise out of him,” Wolff told the Weekly.
The complaint states that Pack was fired for not submitting sales-related data in the company’s tracking system, even though Pack states that other salespeople who did not input their activity into the system were not penalized.
“Not only did he bully my client. He bullied other older workers,” Wolff said. “The fact that Jerdonek told another employee that ‘Bob’s a total loser’ and ‘He won’t last long,’ just shows how unfit for management Jerdonek is. I hope Rollins now does the investigation they were required by law to conduct when they received their first internal complaint about Jerdonek.”
Orkin did not directly respond to the allegations due to it being a personnel matter, an Orkin spokesperson told the Weekly. However, the spokesperson said the company takes complaints seriously and is committed to “doing right by both our customers and our employees.”
“We aim to create a working environment that is welcoming and supportive for our employees, and we have launched an internal review into the alleged issues,” the Orkin spokesperson said. “If we find actions incongruent with our company values, we will take the appropriate actions to rectify the situation.”
It is unclear whether the branch manager is represented by Orkin’s attorneys or has his own legal counsel.
Pack is a longtime Danville resident whose children Troy, 10, and Alana, 7, died on Oct. 26, 2003 after a woman who was abusing opioids and drunk at the time drove onto the sidewalk where the kids were riding their scooter and bicycle, respectively. Their mother Carmen Pack, who was pregnant with twins, was also hit. She survived, but the twins did not.
The complaint states that the driver had multiple DUIs before killing Pack’s two kids and had been obtaining opiates from a number of different doctors. At the time, doctors had no system for finding out their patients’ narcotic prescribing history.
After the family tragedy, Pack came up with a system that collects all narcotic prescriptions from a pharmacy and transmits that information to a centralized database so doctors could see the patient’s complete narcotic prescription history and avoid over-prescribing those drugs to people. That system has since been adopted by every state in the U.S., except for Missouri, and is now known as the California Cures Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Because of what happened, Wolff states in the complaint that Pack has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and that even to this day, he and his wife “experience periodic episodes of despair and anxiety that are triggered by stressful events.”
Pack’s lawyer claims in the complaint that his manager caused a lot of stress since the time Pack was hired by Orkin in November 2022.
The complaint alleges that Jerdonek, being fully aware of Pack’s history, continuously asked Pack if he drank, had been drinking or had been high on marijuana during work. In a YouTube video from the Bay Area Christian Church, Jerdonek is seen talking about his own struggle as a recovering alcoholic and addict.
Pack’s lawyer states that the branch manager never reported any of his concerns regarding Pack to Orkin’s human resources department.
They argue that because of the incident in 2003, Pack is as anti-drug and anti-alcohol as a person can be and is triggered by these topics, but his manager kept bringing them up during work.
Pack also alleges that Jerdonek doubled or sometimes tripled Pack’s proposed client account contracts, which essentially took Pack out of the running for sales. Pack states that at one point, the branch manager greatly adjusted a proposal that the client had already agreed upon and signed, which led to the client backing out of the sale.
Pack alleges the manager did the same thing with a 55-year-old African American employee who had filed a complaint in 2023 stating Jerdonek was bullying and treating her unfairly.
“Pack is informed and believes and alleges that Rollins/Orkin took no steps to investigate her complaint, and that by failing to investigate the complaint the company failed to prevent the harms that had happened and would continue to happen to Pack,” the complaint alleges.
According to the complaint, Pack had tried to bring these issues up with the company’s regional manager in October but Jerdonek refused to give Pack the regional manager’s number citing policy which said that his branch manager had to be a part of that meeting.
Pack did meet with both managers but because of Jerdonek’s presence, Pack contends he felt uncomfortable with going into every detail and the regional manager ended up taking the branch manager’s side, according to the complaint. Pack was then fired the following month, on Nov. 6, after his third write-up for not entering his sales activity into the company’s sales-tracking system.
Pack’s 35-page civil complaint seeks an unspecified amount of special, general and punitive damages for his experience, as well as reimbursement for past and future lost wages and bonuses, attorneys fees and court costs.
A case management conference has been set for June 5 at the Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in Oakland.
