Mondol, et al v. Somerville, MA, et al
Filing
OPINION issued by Rogeriee Thompson, Appellate Judge; Bruce M. Selya, Appellate Judge and William J. Kayatta, Jr., Appellate Judge. Unpublished. [17-2076]
Case: 17-2076
Document: 00117328722
Page: 1
Date Filed: 08/20/2018
Entry ID: 6192204
Not for Publication in West's Federal Reporter
United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 17-2076
GALILEO MONDOL; ALISON HINES; MARK MONDOL,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
CITY OF SOMERVILE; JOSEPH CURTATONE; ANTHONY PIERANTOZZI;
GEORGE SCARPELLI,
Defendants, Appellees.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Allison D. Burroughs, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Thompson, Selya, and Kayatta,
Circuit Judges.
Selena Fitanides, with whom Christopher Maffucci and Casner
& Edwards, LLP were on brief, for appellants.
Leonard H. Kesten, with whom Deidre Brennan Regan, Michael
Stefanilo, Jr., and Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten, LLP were on
brief, for appellees.
August 20, 2018
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Date Filed: 08/20/2018
THOMPSON, Circuit Judge.
Entry ID: 6192204
As part of the aftermath of an
incident at a Somerville High School summer soccer camp (including
sexual
assaults
perpetrated
against
three
freshmen
soccer
players), Plaintiff Galileo Mondol ("Mondol") and his parents
(together, "Appellants") sued the City of Somerville, the head
soccer coach, the superintendent of Somerville's public schools,
and the Mayor of Somerville (who was also the assistant soccer
coach) ("Appellees" or "Defendants") after the Berkshire County
D.A.'s office dropped criminal charges and allegations of juvenile
malfeasance
Appellants
against
claimed
violate--Mondol's
Mondol
for
Appellees
Fourteenth
his
role
conspired
Amendment
to
due
in
the
incident.
violate--and
process
rights
did
by
intentionally interfering with the police investigation and making
false statements to the police and public in order to influence
the investigation and adjudication of the criminal claims (count
I).
Appellants
also
claimed
the
three
individually-named
Defendants' actions violated the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act
(count II), and that they conspired to commit--and did commit-the tortious acts of defamation and intentional infliction of
emotional distress (counts III-V).
The parties are familiar with
the sequence of events that brought them to court, so we need not
recount the details here.
The district court granted summary
judgment in favor of Appellees on all five claims, and Appellants
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ask us to reverse the district court judge's decision and vacate
the summary judgment.
We review grants of summary judgment de novo.
Garcia-
Garcia v. Costco Wholesale Corp., 878 F.3d 411, 417 (1st Cir.
2017).
After carefully studying the record and the arguments
Appellants make on appeal, we find no basis to reverse.
In that
regard, we have often stated that when "a trial court accurately
takes the measure of a case, persuasively explains its reasoning,
and reaches a correct result, it serves no useful purpose for a
reviewing court to write at length in placing its seal of approval
on the decision below."
Moses v. Mele, 711 F.3d 213, 216 (1st
Cir. 2013) (collecting cases).
We substantially agree with the
district court's reasoning and conclusions in its Memorandum &
Order granting summary judgment, and so we will be brief with our
discussion of Appellants' arguments.
To cut to the chase, we
affirm the entry of summary judgment in favor of Appellees for the
reasons described by the district court, adding a few brief
comments in response to Appellants' arguments before us.
First.
brief
that
the
Appellants repeatedly assert throughout their
district
court
misunderstood
their
claims,
disregarded evidence, and failed to draw inferences in their favor
regarding
Appellees'
alleged
conspiracy
to
cover
up
their
responsibility for the soccer camp incident. Appellants base these
assertions
on
their
conclusions
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that
Appellees
continued
to
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Entry ID: 6192204
investigate the incident after the police instructed them not to
and used psychologically coercive discourse to suggest to the
freshmen soccer players that Mondol was a perpetrator of the sexual
assaults.
Appellants claim that if the district court had been
willing to draw reasonable inferences in their favor (as it was
obligated to do in this procedural posture), it would have inferred
that, during Appellees' multiple meetings in the days following
the first disclosure of the incident, they agreed to frame Mondol
to distract from their alleged failure to supervise the students
at the camp properly.
judgment,
however,
reasonable.
Based on the evidence on record at summary
this
inference
would
be
speculative,
not
The district court declined to speculate such a
nefarious purpose from the evidence on the summary judgment record,
and we do too.
In fact, to make the leap from the evidence in the record
to the conclusion that genuine issues of material fact exist
regarding the elements of the claims Appellants assert against
Appellees would require us to create a pyramid of inferences, which
we won't do.
"Assumptions are not a substitute for evidence.
In
this instance, [Appellants'] assertion[s] pile[] inference upon
inference until the entire pyramid topples of its own weight."
Gomez v. Stop & Shop Supermarket Co., 670 F.3d 395, 398 (1st Cir.
2012).
We especially do not "pyramid[] speculative inference upon
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speculative inference."
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Entry ID: 6192204
Jane Doe No. 1 v. Backpage.com, LLC, 817
F.3d 12, 25 (1st Cir. 2016).
To be sure, Appellants make a plausible assumption that
the purpose of Appellees' multiple meetings in the days following
the disclosure of the sexual assaults was, in part, to minimize
the public relations damage to Somerville's soccer team, high
school, and public officials.
disputed
material
facts
in
But without pointing to specific,
the
record--as
is
their
burden--
Appellants' assumption that the P.R. strategy included framing
Mondol as a perpetrator in order to shield themselves from scrutiny
for the role their alleged lack of supervision played in the
occurrence
of
the
sexual
assumption over proof."
assaults
"impermissibly
Gomez, 670 F.3d at 398.
elevates
Simply because
an assumption is possible does not make it reasonable.
For
example,
Appellants
point
to
evidence
that
Defendants continued to gather information from the soccer players
after the police instructed them not to further investigate the
incident to show they intended to frame Mondol and influence the
soccer players to point their fingers at Mondol.
But even if the
coaches did in fact gather information from their players in a
team meeting, this fact, without more, doesn't lead to a reasonable
inference that they were intending to interfere with the police
investigation or were acting on an agreement to frame Mondol. Such
an inference requires speculation.
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Appellants also point us to deposition testimony from
some of the alleged subordinate co-conspirators1 (members of the
Mayor's
staff,
assistant
coaches),
but
this
testimony
only
demonstrates that these subordinates were involved in the meetings
and
conversations
in
the
days
following
the
soccer
camp.
Appellants would like us to speculate that the subordinates'
involvement
conspiracy
shows
to
deliberate
cover-up
the
actions
named
in
furtherance
Defendants'
master
of
the
plan
to
distract from their own alleged negligence, but, as we've already
explained, we need to be able to draw reasonable inferences, not
speculative ones.
Appellants
also
argue
the
district
court
ignored
evidence of Appellees' actions before the soccer camp and in the
weeks and months after the camp from which it could have drawn
reasonable inferences that Appellees were engaged in a conspiracy.
At least two of the exhibits to which Appellants point, however,
are to documents written and distributed before the soccer camp (a
letter about the summer soccer camp to parents from the head coach
1
Appellants argue the district judge erred by disregarding
the evidence in the record of Defendants' subordinates' actions
evidencing the conspiracy and that the subordinates' actions
should have been imputed to the named Defendants. But Appellants
don't make any arguments about imputing the actions of these
subordinates to Defendants in their opposition to Appellees'
motion for summary judgment, so this argument is arguably waived.
But we include it to further illustrate our point about speculative
inferences.
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and meeting notes or an agenda from a coaches meeting that took
place almost a year prior to the summer soccer camp), so we would
have to infer that Appellees formed the conspiracy prior to the
summer soccer camp and prior to the incident.
This is beyond
speculative and borders on the preposterous.
Second.
Appellants are right when they say it would
have been "enough for [them] to establish that the defendants and
their agents agreed to interfere with the criminal investigation
with the improper purpose of covering up their own responsibility
for the incident, [and] that they knowingly framed and publicly
vilified [Mondol] in so doing."
But while Appellants claim there
are "ample facts" in the record to establish these propositions,
they don't point them out to us.
And they needed to.
A colorful
image we have borrowed in the past from the Seventh Circuit is apt
in this context: we aren't pigs in search of truffles, United
States v. Dunkel, 927 F.2d 955, 956 (7th Cir. 1991) (per curiam),
and "we will not become archeologists, devoting scarce judge-time
to dig through the record in the hopes of finding something
[Appellants] should have found." Belsito Commc'ns, Inc. v. Decker,
845 F.3d 13, 22 (1st Cir. 2016) (citing RodrĂguez–Machado v.
Shinseki, 700 F.3d 48, 50 (1st Cir. 2012) (per curiam)).
We won't
dig into a thousand-plus pages of deposition excerpts and exhibits
to determine whether there are material, disputed facts to be
resolved by a jury.
Appellants needed to point us directly to
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them. As the district judge wrote about the intentional infliction
of emotional distress claim:
"Had [Appellants] produced evidence
from which a rational juror could conclude that Defendants framed
[Mondol], deliberately lied to law enforcement, or intentionally
influenced witnesses to do so, this claim could have survived
summary judgment."
Because Appellants don't specifically point us
to evidence from which a rational jury could conclude Defendants
conspired in the ways alleged by Appellants, there is nothing more
to consider on the specifics of each claim.
Third.
Appellants broadly assert the district court
mischaracterized evidence on the record but only provide one
example to support their contention.
It goes as follows:
The
district court found that Defendants had told witnesses and police
that Mondol had been present in the cabin at the time of the
incident, but did not find that they had said anything else about
his involvement.
According to Appellants, this is wrong because
testimony from a variety of witnesses creates a dispute of material
fact as to whether the soccer coach did more than that, by making
"specific
and
prejudicial
comments
about
[Mondol's]
supposed
participation" in the sexual assaults on the three freshmen.
The
only place in the record to which Appellants directly point as
support for their argument is deposition testimony from one of the
soccer team's co-captains.
He testified at his deposition that
during one of the first team meetings after the incident came to
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light, the head coach cried in front of his co-captains.
The co-
captain testified he had inferred from the head coach's mood at
the end of the meeting that the coach was upset with the players
who had been a part of the incident and felt in some way responsible
for the incident, as had all of the players.
But a soccer player's
inference drawn from his coach's body language does not lead to a
reasonable
inference
regarding
the
coach's
intent
to
form
a
conspiracy to frame Mondol.
As we have said before, "[t]he summary judgment stage is
the put up or shut up moment in litigation."
Garmon v. Nat'l R.R.
Passenger Corp., 844 F.3d 307, 316 (1st Cir. 2016) (quoting
Jakobiec v. Merrill Lynch Life Ins. Co., 711 F.3d 217, 226 (1st
Cir. 2013)).
mentioned
Appellants have not done so.
all
considered
of
each
Appellants'
of
them.
We
arguments,
acknowledge
While we have not
we
have
that
carefully
what
Mondol
experienced in the aftermath of the incident was likely lifealtering, but, for the reasons discussed above, and given the
district
court's
thorough
and
accurate
resolution
of
all
of
Appellants' claims on Appellees' motion for summary judgment, we
let the judgment in favor of Appellees stand.
Affirmed.
Costs to Appellees.
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