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A wrongful termination lawsuit brought by a former supervisor in the San Diego City Attorney’s Office took an unexpected turn Thursday, when the plaintiff publicly released a recording by a key witness saying she was lied to, bullied and forced to sign an untrue declaration by lawyers on the city’s defense team.
A 20-minute audio file was distributed by email Thursday morning to the entire City Council, City Attorney Mara Elliott and the private law firm she hired to defend the city in the civil case, Burke Williams Sorensen. The person who recorded the tape is Kathryn McGhee, a local woman who previously dated a lawyer in the City Attorney’s Office named Mark Skeels.
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The law firm representing the city of San Diego in a pair of high-profile legal disputes is the subject of a new allegation, that one of its partners threatened a witness in a civil case with personal and professional harm if he did not testify in the city’s favor.
Senior Chief Deputy City Attorney Mark Skeels said in sworn declarations filed this week that attorney William Price, of the Burke Williams Sorenson law firm, sought to influence how Skeels might testify in a lawsuit against his employer, the city of San Diego. The law firm is representing the city in the lawsuit.
LA JOLLA
An attorney has agreed to represent a homeless Black man who was punched and arrested by two San Diego police officers in La Jolla last week, and both she and an activist working with the man said Tuesday they are pressing for prosecutors to decline to bring criminal charges in the case.
A bystander recorded cellphone footage of the arrest of Jesse Evans near a busy intersection near UC San Diego on the morning of May 12.
Evans said two police officers stopped him as he unclasped his pants to urinate close to some trees. The confrontation escalated and Evans was wrestled to the ground, where the officers punched him repeatedly in his face and legs.