A top supervisor in the Queens District Attorney’s office has been accused in a new civil rights lawsuit of mocking an investigator with comments about his Latino heritage and his stuttering.
Assistant Chief Daniel O’Brien is accused of racial and disability discrimination in a suit filed last month in Manhattan State Supreme Court by former colleague Jason Robles, who is now retired. The suit comes on the heels of a race and gender discrimination suit filed against O’Brien by a different accuser in May.
The newest suit claims O’Brien relentlessly mocked Robles, “repeating the same sound or word over and over again to make fun of [plaintiff], which they said was ‘just a joke’ and ‘it was OK’ the plaintiff could ‘take a joke.’”
O’Brien told others, including Robles’ wife, that Robles looked like a drug cartel hit man in the TV show, “Queen of the South,” and routinely made fun of Robles’ supposedly flashy clothes, according to the suit.
“You Spanish guys can dress like that,” Robles told the News O’Brien said.
Robles, 52, is Puerto Rican.
John Scola, Robles’ lawyer, is critical of the DA’s office leadership for failing to fire O’Brien in December 2022 after the DA’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity substantiated a Robles claim that he’d been subjected to insulting ethnic comments.
“The effect of not doing anything is they basically are saying. ‘We don’t care about discrimination in the workplace.’” Scola told the Daily News. “‘We’re OK with people getting harassed based on their race or their disability or their religion.”‘
O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said the office does not comment on personnel matters but that it encourages any aggrieved employees to file a report.
“The Queens District Attorney’s Office has a robust system in place to investigate EEO allegations,” the spokesman said.
This is not the first time O’Brien has been accused of discrimination.
Eight months after Robles’ EEO complaint was substantiated, another supervisor, Lt. Rachael Alvarez, said she met with the OEEO to discuss how she was being treated by O’Brien.
Alvarez, who is Black, said that when O’Brien and other supervisors found out she had contacted the OEEO she decided not to meet with internal investigators and instead left the job. In May she filed a civil rights lawsuit in which she accused O’Brien of insulting her with racially- charged insults, The News previously reported.
O’Brien called her a “black pest” and a “bed bug,” according to the suit.
The filing cites Green’s Dictionary of Slang in characterizing the language as derogatory and racially charged, saying the term “bed bug” was first used to describe Black railroad porters who turned down the beds of white passengers but later evolved to mean an insignificant person or drug addict.
This week, Scola, who also represents Alvarez, suggested her lawsuit could have been prevented if Robles’ complaints had been taken more seriously.
“This is why you have to take action when a complaint is substantiated,” Scola said in an interview.
Before being hired in 2021 to help conduct drug and ghost gun investigations for the DA’s office, Robles worked for the New York State Police for 27 years. He acknowledged that while working for the Queens DA his credibility was called into question and he was eventually sidelined, given non-enforcement duties.
Robles In October 2021 was involved in a fistfight with a colleague in a dispute over whether to conduct a car stop. After the fistfight, some prosecutors raised doubts about having Robles testify, noting that while with State Police he was issued a letter of censure seven different times for various infractions ranging from buying Glock gun switches online using his undercover name to misplacing his police radio.
In September 2022, he was transferred to an administrative assignment and was no longer conducting investigations for the DA.
Robles, who retired in March 2023, told the News he was proud of his record and noted he is still being called to testify in Queens cases he was involved in before he was sidelined. Besides, he said, he should not face discrimination regardless of the quality of his work.
Robles told The News he has dealt his entire life with insults about his stuttering and that at first he ignored O’Brien’s comments.
But it persisted, he said.
“Then he just started laughing,” Robles said. “Everyone in the room was mortified.”
Robles said he decided to take legal action as the problem worsened and as he saw other co-workers allegedly demeaned by O’Brien — other Latinos for how they dressed, for instance, and an Asian woman asked if she breastfed her baby duck sauce.
He filed two complaints with the OEEO right after he was transferred.
The allegations of “racial discrimination and disability discrimination” against O’Brien were unsubstantiated, according to the letter he received from the OEEO. But his allegations of harassment based on derogatory and ethnic comments and retaliation were substantiated. It was unclear if any discipline resulted from that.
Robles at that point thought O’Brien might be in hot water.
“They should have fired him,” Robles said. “It was happening over and over again. And not just me. He did this all the time. I told at least five people they should file complaints, but they were worried about keeping their jobs. I didn’t need the job.”
