Jennifer Sokol was a firefighter for the better part of two decades.
“I was good at my job,” she said. “I loved it.”
Sokol received an award in 2020 from her employer, Los Pinos Fire Protection District, for a daring rescue. And the three most recent annual performance reviews written by her captain paint a picture of a firefighter who was dependable, competent and ambitious.
Fire departments are paramilitary organizations. Their command structure is rigid, the camaraderie among firefighters imbued into the workplace.
So it was with trepidation in December 2022 that Sokol reported to law enforcement and her superiors that Matt Misquez, her former boyfriend who was also a firefighter at Los Pinos, had physically assaulted her and destroyed her electronics to prevent her from calling for help in a drunken rage 16 months earlier.
“I was terrified for my job,” Sokol said. “I was scared of being retaliated against by my co-workers and the person who assaulted me. I was afraid for my safety.”
Those fears, it would turn out, were not unfounded.
In early March 2023, Misquez pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and agreed to end his employment at LPFPD. He was allowed to resign from the department, and it was Sokol, his victim, who was fired from the agency one week later.
Other firefighters had accused Sokol of violating department policy. By demanding accommodations that would keep her assailant away from her personal items and the station during her shift, colleagues submitted that Sokol was paranoid and dishonest.
Experiencing domestic violence?
Alternative Horizons operates a 24/7/365 hotline with immediate and ongoing counseling, advocacy, information and referrals for survivors of domestic violence at 247-9619.
She filed a lawsuit against the district, which covers 325 square miles in La Plata and Archuleta counties, alleging wrongful termination and discrimination in late 2023. The parties settled the case earlier this year.
The department agreed to pay Sokol and her attorney $125,000 to settle the case, according to a copy of the agreement obtained through a records request, and did not admit any wrongdoing. The payout was made by the district’s insurer, and not directly out of LPFPD’s balance sheet.
Los Pinos also agreed to provide domestic violence training to its employees, add an anti-retaliation training and change the status of Sokol’s departure from termination to resignation.
Depositions and documents brought to light as part of the litigation reflect that many of Sokol’s fears about retaliation were fair premonitions.
“Look what happened to me – I lost an entire career after being assaulted by somebody,” Sokol said.
It took 16 months for Sokol to report to her superiors at the department that Misquez had accused her of cheating, smashed glassware, put a fist through a door and grabbed her hard enough to leave bruises.
But after she did, in December 2022, Sokol wrote an email to her captain, the now-retired fire chief Tony Harwig, and the deputy chief Josh Lorenzen (who has since been promoted to chief), expressing some of her fears around sharing a workspace with her assailant.
“Now that he knows I have reported this incident I am very concerned about him retaliating out of anger,” she wrote.
As the legal proceedings against Misquez drew on, Sokol demanded accommodations from the department. Citing fears that her ex might tamper with her personal protective equipment or seek physical retaliation while she was asleep at the station, she asked that the department limit his access to the station only to the times when he was working, and provide a secure storage location for her belongings.
The department altered the two firefighters’ schedules so they would not interact, per the terms of a protection order, but declined to make other accommodations.
When Sokol filed a formal complaint asking for accommodations in February and informed Harwig that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder which was triggered by exposure or risk of exposure to her assailant, the district placed her on leave.
Harwig asked her to have her medical practitioner complete a questionnaire on the diagnosis.
Sokol would later learn that at the same time, there was a coordinated behind-the-scenes effort to get her fired, based on court documents.
Chief Lorenzen declined to comment for this story. Harwig could not be reached for comment.
Around the time Sokol lodged a formal complaint, a firefighter on another shift, Ryan Mulay, circulated a letter among Los Pinos staff detailing his concerns with Sokol’s conduct.
Mulay had gone to Harwig to express his concerns.
“It was implied that further action would be easier if there was something in writing in some manner or another,” Mulay said during a deposition under oath, recalling a conversation with the chief.
Harwig’s deposition confirmed this account.
“I told ’em I couldn’t do anything about it unless I get it in writing,” he said, also under oath.
So Mulay obliged.
“People were frustrated. People had felt betrayed. People’s reputations were at stake. And there were a lot of policies that we thought were broken,” Mulay told Sokol’s attorney, David Albrechta, in a deposition.
His four-page letter was sermonic, replete with moralistic quotes, and accused Sokol of playing up her victimhood, violating department policies, poor work ethic and insinuated she was “spiteful, dishonest, and potentially mentally unstable.”
Sokol had lost the trust of her co-workers, Mulay alleged. He wrote that she had gone after “one of her own, who is a kind and gentle man who has truly never meant to harm her,” and said she “has been continually playing the female privilege and mental and emotional damages cards, regardless of any actual damage.”
Mulay also alleged that Sokol avoided training, was lazy at work and noted that she brought blackout curtains to work so she could sleep.
“If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away,” Mulay wrote, quoting the Book of Matthew. “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”
The undated letter was signed by 11 other firefighters and district employees.
Mulay did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Harwig placed Sokol on leave Feb. 25, pending information about her PTSD diagnosis. That was around the time Mulay delivered to him the petition, although no one could remember precisely the timing.
On March 7, the day Misquez resigned, Sokol’s health care provider informed Harwig that Sokol’s job performance was not compromised as long as she was not exposed to her assailant, and on March 9, that letter was updated to say that no additional accommodations would be necessary, given Misquez’s resignation.
On March 14, 2023, Harwig called Sokol into a meeting and fired her.
Her termination letter noted that Sokol had created dissension among district employees and contained verbatim passages lifted from Mulay’s petition. Harwig wrote that Sokol had violated the district’s policies mandating professional conduct and courtesy to other members.
In a deposition, Harwig said he had partially relied on unconfirmed rumors when he fired Sokol.
Today, Sokol views the petition as verified manifestation of the very fears for which she was described as “paranoid.”
“Everything that I was scared of happening when I reported did happen to me,” she said. “The petition is proof of that.”
Her captain, Kevin Griego, testified the comments in his annual reviews – that Sokol was “always willing to help anyone” and “a true pleasure to work with” – were accurate, and remained accurate through the date Sokol was placed on leave.
Harwig testified that “quite a bit” had changed with Sokol between when he signed her last evaluation in August 2022, and when he fired her in March 2023. Save for a single write-up from another captain, Harwig struggled in a deposition to explain what else had changed aside from the dozen of Sokol’s co-workers who had turned on her.
Fear of retaliation – the kind Sokol both feared and experienced – is not uncommon in cases involving domestic violence, said Valerie Ross, executive director of Alternative Horizons, a Durango nonprofit that provides services and advocacy for survivors of domestic violence.
“Domestic violence is a highly underreported crime for an array of reasons including shame, isolation, ‘victim blaming’ and, most prevalent, fear of the perpetrator’s physical, verbal, emotional, financial, and legal retaliation,” Ross wrote in an email to The Durango Herald, speaking about domestic violence in general and not about any specific case.
“We have this culture that is more willing to believe a woman made up assault charges than a man actually did it, and the victim blaming that goes on keeps women from reporting,” Sokol said. “The petition is proof of that.”
Sokol’s ability to speak about some specifics of the case is barred by the settlement.
But given the fears she had about reporting – and the realization of some of those fears – she doesn’t hide her desire to draw attention to the events.
“If me talking openly about it can help any other women or men – because I do have male friends who have been victims of domestic violence as well – report it, then it'll not be worth it, but sure make me feel a little better for having had to experience all this,” she said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
