GROOMS v. WIGGINS et al

Filing 14

MEMORANDUM AND/OR OPINION. SIGNED BY HONORABLE CYNTHIA M. RUFE ON 3/4/2014. 3/5/2014 ENTERED AND COPIES E-MAILED; AND MAILED TO UNREP. (ems)

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
____________________________________
DEBORAH GROOMS,
:
Plaintiff,
:
:
CIVIL ACTION
v.
:
:
NO. 13-4244
TYRONE WIGGINS, et al.
:
Defendants.
:
MEMORANDUM OPINION
RUFE, J.

MARCH 4, 2014

Deborah Grooms has sued Tyrone Wiggins; the City of Philadelphia; former Police
Commissioners Richard Neal, John Timoney, and Sylvester Johnson; and the Philadelphia
Department of Parks and Recreation, for violations of her constitutional rights actionable under
42 U.S.C. § 1983. Before the Court are motions to dismiss filed on behalf of the City, Neal and
Johnson. For the reasons below, the motions will be granted in part without prejudice and denied
in part as moot.
I.

Facts1
Tyrone Wiggins was a Philadelphia Police Officer. On March 25, 2011, he was sentenced

to seventeen and one half to thirty five years’ incarceration following his conviction for criminal
charges stemming from his eight-year long campaign of horrifying sexual abuse of Plaintiff
Deborah Grooms. Although Wiggins is a defendant to this lawsuit, he is not a party to the
present motions.
When Grooms was ten years old, she was enrolled in a karate class taught by Wiggins
that took place at the Olney Recreation Center, a facility operated by the Parks Department. A
fair inference from the Complaint is that the Police Department could dictate whether or not
1

The facts are taken from the Complaint and accepted as true.

Wiggins taught at Olney. Wiggins ingratiated himself with Grooms’s family, and after he had
known Grooms for about two years he began to abuse her. Over the next eight years he raped her
repeatedly.
Wiggins used his physical strength, proximity to Grooms’s family, and his status as a
police officer to intimidate Grooms. He threatened her with incarceration if she ever told anyone
about his actions. He also committed some of his crimes against Grooms while he was on duty as
a police officer: he would drop Grooms’s brother off at the police station’s weight room so that
the brother could exercise while Wiggins drove to Fairmount Park to abuse Grooms, and when a
radio dispatcher called to ask where he was, Wiggins would lie. On more than one occasion,
Wiggins was at Grooms’s apartment, and he was so loud that neighbors reported the
disturbances. Wiggins frustrated any possibility that the reports would free Grooms from
Wiggins’s terrorizing behavior by flashing his badge and telling the officers who responded to
the scene that he was a police officer and that “everything was okay.”2 No one at the police
department ever investigated these disturbances further.
Finally in 2006, Grooms mustered the courage to call the police herself and report
Wiggins’s history with her. Wiggins was suspended pursuant to an order of Johnson. However
he was still permitted to teach karate at Olney Recreational Center during the investigation, and
before it concluded, Wiggins was returned to active duty. Later, he was permitted to resign,
which may have enabled him to retain his pension, and after his arrest the Police Department
continued to allow him to teach karate at Olney.

2

Compl., Doc. No. 1, at ¶ 42.

2

II.

Standard of Review
As the Supreme Court has held, “To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must

contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its
face. A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court
to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.”3 The
pleading standard “demands more than an unadorned, the-defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me
accusation,”4 and therefore a Plaintiff’s “complaint must contain enough factual allegations,”
accepted as true, to permit a court to infer that “discovery would provide evidence of each
element of the claim.”5
III.

Discussion
A.

§ 1983 Claims

The moving defendants do not dispute that Grooms has stated an injury cognizable under
§ 1983, namely a violation of her substantive due process right to bodily integrity, nor do they
argue that her action is time-barred.6 They do, however, argue that Grooms’s complaint fails to
state a sufficient factual basis to impose liability on the moving defendants, two police
commissioners and the City of Philadelphia.

3

Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

4

Id.

5

Brewer v. U.S. Fire Ins. Co., 446 F. App’x 506, 510 (3d Cir. 2011).

6

In any event, the action is timely. “In § 1983 actions . . . a state statute of limitations and the coordinate
tolling rules are . . . binding rules of law.” Bd. of Regents of Univ. of State of N. Y. v. Tomanio, 446 U.S. 478, 484
(1980). Ordinarily, § 1983 claims against persons acting under color of Pennsylvania law are subject to a two year
statute of limitations, Smith v. City of Pittsburgh, 764 F.2d 188, 194 (3d Cir. 1985), but Grooms’s claims were tolled
until twelve years after she turned eighteen. 42 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 5533(b)(2).

3

Grooms has advanced two theories of liability with respect to the moving defendants.
First she has alleged that they should be held liable for failing to train police officers; second,
that the City caused her constitutional violations pursuant to official policies or customs.
In order to establish liability for failure to train, Grooms must plead (1) that the individual
defendants were “deliberately indifferent to the need to train” police officers about sexual abuse
and “(2) that the lack of training actually caused the [constitutional] violation in this case.”7 To
establish deliberate indifference, Grooms must allege “that a municipal actor disregarded a
known or obvious consequence of his action.”8 To allege that “action pursuant to official
municipal policy caused [her] injury,” she may point to “the decisions of a government’s
lawmakers, the acts of its policymaking officials, and practices so persistent and widespread as to
practically have the force of law.”9
Grooms argues that she has pleaded sufficient facts by extensively quoting from her
complaint several recitations of elements of cognizable § 1983 actions. For example, in the
complaint she stated that she brought “this action against the City of Philadelphia . . . for failing
to properly screen, train, control, monitor, and/or supervise Defendant Wiggins’ activities and
conduct . . . .”10 Similarly, she states, without alleging any supporting facts, that the individual
“[d]efendants knew or should have known that Wiggins was abusing his authority as a Police
Officer to sexually exploit Plaintiff . . . .”11 These and the other quotations from the complaint
put the Defendants on fair notice of the legal theories of the claims they are to defend against,

7

Connick v. Thompson, 131 S. Ct. 1350, 1358 (2011).

8

Id. at 1360.

9

Id. at 1359.

10

Doc. No 3 at 11–12.

11

Doc. No. 11-1 at 17.

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and they may have been enough to state a claim for relief under Conley v. Gibson.12 However,
Iqbal makes it clear that an allegation of harm coupled with the recitation of a legal theory is not
sufficient to state a claim to relief. Rather, Grooms must allege in her complaint sufficient facts
to make it plausible that after discovery she will have evidence of “each element” of her
claims.13
With respect to the failure-to-train accusation, the complaint does not give sufficient
indication of the factual basis of the two essential elements, namely deliberate indifference and
causation, to state a plausible claim for relief. Beyond alleging that Neal and Johnson were the
Commissioners of Police at the times when Grooms’s constitutional rights were violated, she
alleges no facts to support the inference that at the time she was abused there was any known or
obvious condition that required training that either individual defendant failed to address.
Grooms argues in both her complaint and in her opposition to the motions to dismiss that the
individual defendants had a continuing duty to review police officers’ conduct and credentials,
but this does not rise to the level of “actual or constructive notice that a particular omission in
their training program causes city employees to violate citizens’ constitutional rights.” 14
The closest Grooms comes to alleging a known or obvious condition to which
Defendants were deliberately indifferent is when she describes what happened after she reported
Wiggins’s abuse to the police in 2006,15 specifically that Wiggins continued to teach karate at
Olney Recreational Center during the internal affairs investigation into Grooms’s allegations and
12

The cases that Grooms relies on in her opposition to the motions to dismiss were decided when the
prevailing approach to 12(b)(6) motions was to deny the motion “unless it appear[ed] beyond doubt that the plaintiff
c[ould] prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S.
41, 45–46 (1957).
13

Brewer, 446 F. App’x at 510.

14

Connick, 131 S. Ct. at 1360.

15

Compl. at ¶¶ 48–54.

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that he returned to active duty before the investigation ended. Additionally, she alleged that he
was not fired but permitted to resign and that the Police Department continued to allow him to
teach karate at Olney even after his arrest.
Assuming without deciding that these facts could support an inference that Johnson and
the City were deliberately indifferent to the constitutional rights of the people who might come
into contact with Wiggins (particularly young karate students), there is no reason to conclude
that this deliberate indifference caused Grooms’ constitutional violations between 1997 and
2005. Indeed, there is no evidence that the conditions to which anyone could be indifferent were
known or obvious or even existed during those years.
Furthermore, Grooms pleads no facts which could support the inference that Neal (who
was Commissioner until 2002) was on actual or constructive notice of Wiggins’ behavior at any
point. It is not enough that Wiggins abused her. The abuse or the conditions that permitted the
abuse to continue must have been known or obvious to the moving defendant and he must have
chosen to ignore them in order to be held liable on a failure to train theory.16
Grooms further fails to plead facts that could subject the City to liability under a theory
that an official policy or custom caused her injuries. Instead, she relies on generalized allegations
such as the following: “The deprivation of Plaintiff’s substantive due process rights to bodily
integrity resulted from the constitutionally violative policies, practices, procedures and/or
customs of the City of Philadelphia, including but not limited to . . . the development and
implementation of reckless policies, practices and/or procedures governing the conduct of police
officers that inadequately protected citizens, such as Plaintiff Deborah Grooms, from sexual
assaults and violence perpetrated by rogue and out-of-control police officers who use, misuse,

16

Connick, 131 S. Ct. at 1358.

6

and abuse their authority as Police Officers.”17 Despite the prolixity of her complaint, these
allegations contain no facts other than the recitation that the Defendants harmed Grooms. She
never alleges with any specificity what the policy or custom was or any facts beyond her injuries
to suggest that it existed. Therefore, Grooms fails to allege how a factfinder could infer that a
policy, rather than a rogue officer, caused her injuries.
The closest Grooms comes to alleging evidence of a policy that injured her is that while
the abuse was ongoing, her neighbors occasionally called the police; when they did so, Wiggins
would show his badge to the first responders who would then not conduct any investigation into
the call that brought them to the scene. However no allegation links this occurrence with any
policy or custom propounded by the individual or municipal moving defendants. Without any
allegation that there was a policy or custom that shielded police officers from investigation, the
court cannot infer that such a policy or custom caused Grooms’s injuries. It is conceivable that
the responders were acting pursuant to some custom or policy, and therefore leave to amend is
appropriate, but Grooms must plead facts sufficient to describe what the policy or custom was
and how the policy or custom injured her beyond her ipse dixit.
In short, Grooms unquestionably alleges sufficiently that she was injured, but beyond
conclusory statements, she never alleges that police commissioners or other municipal officials
knew or had reason to know of her injuries or that they enforced a specific custom or policy
pursuant to which she was injured. To subject the moving defendants to liability on the basis of
the complaint would be to impose respondeat superior liability in this § 1983 action, which the
Supreme Court prohibits.

17

Doc. No. 3 at 18.

7

B.

Common Law Claims

Defendants also move to dismiss Grooms’s intentional tort claims as against them on the
grounds that they are immune from these claims. Grooms correctly points out that she did not
plead these claims against the moving defendants, and therefore the motion will be denied as
moot with respect to the tort claims, as Grooms argues it should be.
III.

Conclusion
There can be no doubt that Grooms has alleged grievous, abominable injuries. However,

she has failed to allege facts that could support a legal theory that would impose liability on the
moving defendants. Because Defendants have failed to demonstrate that amendment of the
complaint would be futile, and for the reasons stated above, the motion to dismiss will be granted
in part without prejudice and denied as moot in part.18 An appropriate Order follows.

18

Grooms may amend her Complaint within twenty-one days of the entry of the accompanying Order
without further leave of court. If, as this case proceeds against any defendant, Grooms learns of facts that could
support a theory of liability with respect to the moving defendants here, the Court is of course mindful that on
motion it “should freely give leave [to amend] when justice so requires.” Fed. R. Civ. P./15(a)(2).

8