Judge dismisses suit of man stabbed at at Uniontown bar
The lawsuit filed by an Allegheny County man against Uniontown, city police, the former mayor and the owners of a bar where he was stabbed in 2015 was dismissed by a federal judge.
On Thursday, US District Judge Judge Cathy Bissoon granted the motion to dismiss the lawsuit of Jeffrey Jenkins against the city of Uniontown and owners of the Parks Casino Bar.
The lawsuit was filed in June 2016 by Attorney Joel Sansone, representing Jenkins, who was stabbed at the Parks Casino Bar in Uniontown around 2 a.m. Jan. 2, 2015, when an alleged unprovoked altercation occurred.
Jenkins claimed that the investigating police officers, then Uniontown City Mayor Ed Fike and the bar’s co-owners, Kimberly Marshall and Renea Phillipy, entered into a conspiracy to deny Jenkins equal protection of the laws by failing to adequately investigate the incident, as Marshall is Fike’s daughter.
In her filed opinion, Bissoon writes that for Jenkins to have a substantive federal claim under “class-of-one” equal protection, it would need to be established that Jenkins was intentionally treated differently than others similarly situated by the defendants and there was no rational basis for the differential treatment.
She writes that Jenkins “has not identified similarly-situated persons who were treated differently, and this is unsurprising given that, under Plaintiff’s theory of the case, any victim of crime in the Casino might, and seemingly should expect to, receive similar treatment.”
Bissoon writes that another reason that Jenkins couldn’t establish he was denied equal protection was because it was alleged that the defendants did not intentionally discriminate against him, but rather they acted with the intention of benefiting the mayor and his associates.
For that reason, Bissoon writes that any unequal treatment or adverse affect suffered by Jenkins was purely incidental.
“[T]he harm(s) would have been suffered by any other hypothetical person in his shoes,” Bissoon states.