By Teri Figueroa
The San Diego Union-Tribune
EL CAJON, Calif. — It looked just like a phone charger, like someone took the cord but left the brick plugged into a wall outlet in a bunkroom at an El Cajon fire station.
But it was at such a strange location for a phone charger, nearer the foot of a bed. One woman who uses the room wondered: Why not just charge the phone in the power strip on the bedside table?
Later, a closer look by a colleague at that out-of-place phone charger revealed it was actually a camouflaged spy camera, according to a legal claim four women who work at Fire Station 8 filed with the city of El Cajon. All four worked on ambulances based out of the location on East Madison Avenue near East Main Street.
“This is the one place I always felt safe,” said Bella Mason , an emergency medical technician. She said she was immediately “sick to my stomach” on learning of the hidden camera in the room where she slept and changed clothes. “This is so big and so violating.”
Also disturbing is that the culprit has not been caught. Several people have access to the station, and she wonders if it’s someone she knows or who continues to come around. “It could literally be anyone,” Mason said.
“I am so uncomfortable there, I can’t sleep,” she said. “I’m stressed. I feel like I am constantly being watched. Which sucks, because this is my passion. l love what I do. And now I am just expected to just deal with it.”
The status of any investigations — criminal or workplace-related — remains unclear. Police and fire officials referred the Union-Tribune to El Cajon Deputy City Manager Marisol Thorn. She declined comment, citing the open claim and ongoing criminal investigation.
Fire services in El Cajon are provided through Heartland Fire & Rescue Department, a joint powers agreement created with La Mesa and El Cajon. Ambulance services are provided by American Medical Response , or AMR. Its parent company, Global Medical Response, declined to comment, saying, “We do not have any involvement with the investigation and do not have a statement to offer for your story.”
The claim, filed in March, alleged that no workplace investigation was done. It sought unspecified damages in excess of $10,000 each for “psychological treatment, emotional distress, humiliation, anxiety, and mental anguish, as well as punitive damages against the unknown public employees.”
“If you don’t investigate, you are not preventing it from happening in the future,” said attorney Dan Gilleon, who is representing the women.
Gilleon said the city “declined” the claim, which is generally filed as a precursor to a lawsuit.
“They’re all getting therapy because nothing is being done,” Gilleon said of his clients, adding that they “are having to go into a workplace every single day where there has been no corrective action taken.”
And, he and the women said, the stress comes on top of working an already incredibly stressful job of trying to save lives.
The camera was discovered Feb. 2, the claim states. The bunkrooms serve as a bedroom while at work. It’s where the women — and any firefighters, medics or EMTs working at the station — dress and sleep with an expectation of privacy.
Mason said AMR offered to move her, “but I didn’t do anything wrong, and I shouldn’t be kicked from my home station.”
A second spy camera was later found disguised in a clock in a different bunkroom also used by women, they said.
The women say they are mostly in the dark about how the matter is being addressed. “We feel like it’s being swept under the rug,” emergency medical technician Claire Warrenfelt said. “Nothing is being talked about. Nothing has changed to prevent this from happening again.”
The women noted the case is unsolved as far as they are aware, and that leaves them shaken. “There is no way of knowing who to trust, who not to trust,” Warrenfelt said.
She said she no longer uses a bunkroom and spends her time elsewhere while at the station. Medic Tristan Hardin said the situation prompted her to ask for a transfer to a different Heartland station, even though she had been based at Station 8 for nine years.
“It’s super uncomfortable and creepy that someone’s just watching you,” Hardin said, adding that the discovery of the second camera started her head “spiraling.”
The women said they were all told that police obtained a search warrant to see who logged into the station’s Wi-Fi, but the findings were apparently minimal and did not push the investigation forward. Neither that search warrant nor the affidavit in support of it was publicly available.
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