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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A former Kansas City woman who convertedto Islam in 2005 said she was harassed for years at AT&T, and thatthe abuse boiled over in 2008 when her boss snatched her head scarfand exposed her hair. A Jackson County jury on Thursday awarded Susann Bashir $5 millionin punitive damages in her discrimination lawsuit, along with$120,000 in lost wages and other actual damages. The Kansas City Star ( bit.ly/JKWbqR ) reported Saturday the award appears to be the largest juryverdict for a workplace discrimination case in Missouri history. Bashir said in court documents that her work environment becamehostile immediately after she converted, with her co-workers makingharassing comments about her religion and referring to her hijab as"that thing on her head." "I was shocked. I thought, `What is going on?'" she told thenewspaper. "Nobody ever cared what I wore before. Nobody ever caredwhat religion I was before." Bashir worked at AT&T's office in Kansas City for 10 years as afiber optics network builder before being fired from her$70,000-a-year job. She claimed she endured religiousdiscrimination nearly every day of the final three years she workedthere, including being asked if she was going to blow up thebuilding and being called a "towelhead" and a terrorist. AT&T said Friday it disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. Despite the jury's award, Bashir stands to receive much less than$5 million because Missouri law caps such awards at five times theactual damage amount, plus attorney fees. Amy Coopman, Bashir's lawyer, said attorney fees will be determinedlater by the judge. The previous largest such verdict came in 2009, when MohamedAlhalabi, an Arab-American Muslim, was awarded $811,949 in St.Louis County Circuit Court in a case against the MissouriDepartment of Natural Resources. That same year, a Jonesboro, Ark., jury ordered AT&T to pay $1.3million to two former employees fired for attending a Jehovah'sWitnesses convention. Bashir said she called an employee help line in March 2005 andasked the company to provide sensitivity training for herco-workers. "It was a worthless call," she said. "Nothing ever changed." The harassment continued and in March 2008, the Equal EmploymentOpportunity Commission launched an investigation after she filed acomplaint. She said that made some workers angry and led to the finalencounter with her boss. Bashir said she became so stressed out that she couldn't return towork. She asked that her boss be removed or that she betransferred, but neither happened. She was fired after not returning to work for nine months. "By firing me, they stole my ability to work at a job I liked,"Bashir said. She said the incident was hard on her mentally and physically andtore her family apart. She is going through a divorce, and inOctober she and her daughter moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where sheworks as an apartment manager. "I have mixed feelings," Bashir said. "I'm happy not to bereporting to that management structure. But it's hard in thiseconomy to find a job with that level of compensation. I didn'twant to lose my job, because I felt I was doing good work." --- Information from: The Kansas City Star, 2012 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published,broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use . We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Manual Swing Gate Manufacturer , China Swing Arm Barrier for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Automatic Traffic Barrier.
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