N E WS
Durham Johnny Ray Lynch PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
Unfair Game A former Durham city employee was fired due to charges he says are bogus. He wants his old job back. BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com
B
efore dawn on Thanksgiving morning, the police accused Johnny Ray Lynch of breaking into an internet cafe in East Durham. But Lynch says he wasn’t breaking into the City of Gold. He says he was locked inside and trying to get out when he tripped the alarm. Officers entered the dark building and found him inside of a ceiling heating duct in the bathroom. Two felony charges are bad enough, but Lynch also lost his job as a supervisor with the City of Durham’s street maintenance division. He was a city employee for nearly 17 years. The day after his arrest, Lynch called his direct supervisor and told him what happened. “He told me when I came back to work to let the [head] supervisor know,” Lynch said. “He said, ‘Keep me posted, but you good.’”
Not really. Lynch, 48, filed a grievance with the city that states he was wrongfully fired for breaking a law for “which I am not guilty of and haven’t been found guilty [of].” He wants “to be rehired with full benefits, back pay, and an apology” from the street maintenance division’s director. City spokeswoman Beverly Thompson told the INDY that she could not specifically comment about Lynch’s firing because it is a personnel matter. But Thompson shared the city’s administrative leave policy that was used to determine Lynch’s employment status. The policy states that if an employee is charged with any criminal offense—excluding traffic violations, serious performance issues, or is under investigation for
“possible serious misconduct”—then the city can place the worker on administrative leave with pay for up to 10 days. A second option allows the city to reassign an employee “until closure is brought regarding the allegations.” Lynch’s supervisors and other city officials concluded that neither of those options were “appropriate due to the nature of the allegations” in accordance with the leave policy and so exercised a third option: the street maintenance supervisor could be suspended without pay or terminated. On December 18, Lynch’s supervisors fired him for violating the city’s employee ethics code. “The evidence against Mr. Lynch is compelling, [and] is in conflict with the statement provided by Mr. Lynch to divisional management and is representative of gross misconduct,” his direct supervisor stated in the termination letter. But evidence of Lynch’s innocence is also compelling and casts doubt that he actually broke into the City of Gold. It was near closing time on November 26 at The Pickleback bar in downtown Durham, where Lynch and several of his friends had been drinking. “We left at closing,” Lynch says. “Then we stopped over at the sweepstakes [cafe] at Lakewood Shopping Center.” Lynch enjoys sitting down at the electronic fishing tables, where patrons sit or stand, plunk money down for the chance to use a joystick, and “shoot” at electronic fish, monster crabs, dragons, and mermaids swirling across the animated, vividly-colored table surface. “If you kill it, you get the money,” Lynch explains about the fish targets. “There is really no limit on how much you can win; $5,000, $8,000. I won $10,000 playing. Another time I won $14,000.” Lynch says they found a heavy internet parlor crowd at Lakewood, so he and his friends headed to City of Gold, a black box of a room with three fishing tables. The red brick parlor with black-tinted windows is tucked inside of a strip mall just off of North Miami Boulevard. “I rode with a buddy of mine,” he says. “I really [wasn’t] feeling good, so I went to the bathroom. I was sick from INDYweek.com
March 24, 2021
5