Four employees of a check-cashing company suffered one trauma when they were robbed at gunpoint. Now they're suing ACE Cash Express over another trauma –- being fired for not sounding an alarm during the robberies.

ACE lost $60,000 in robberies at three of its Denver stores between November 2007 and January 2008. In each case, a robber with a gun confronted employees and told them they would be killed if they hit a panic button or punched in an alarm code.

The employees -- Monica Perea, Felicia Dia, Desiree Lopez and Andre Robledo -– were expecting ACE to provide free counseling to help them recover from their ordeal. Instead, they each got a pink slip three days later.

“ACE terminated Plaintiffs in complete and intentional disregard of the further traumatic impact this termination from employment would have on Plaintiffs after such recent and severe trauma from the robberies,” they say in a complaint filed last month in Denver District Court.

The suit alleges ACE violated its own security policies telling workers to cooperate with robbers and Colorado laws which protect crime victims from retaliation. With punitive damages for “outrageous conduct,” the potential recovery is a lot more than $60,000.

“This is just one of the most callous, outrageous ways of treating an employee that I've ever heard of,” plaintiffs' attorney Gregg McReynolds told KCNC-TV in Denver.

ACE Cash Express, which is based in Irving, Texas, is the largest owner, operator and franchisor of check-cashing stores in the U.S. The company went private in a 2006 management-led buyout valued at about $420 million.

The first in the series of robberies occurred Nov. 3, 2007 at the store where Perea, an assistant manager, worked. As she entered the store, the suit says, “an armed robber ... grabbed her arm and demanded that she open the store safe.”

The robber “apparently had knowledge concerning the company's security procedures” and “If Perea had followed ACE procedures and had hit an alarm or entered an alarm code into the security system, she most likely would have been killed.”

The other robberies followed a similar pattern, although a pair of robbers, one of them armed, confronted Dia and Lopez. “I kept thinking how it was going to end and I thought I was going to die,” Lopez recalled.

Colorado is an “at-will” employment state, but the plaintiffs say they were told during training that they could not be terminated “without a legitimate reason.” They were all fired for “failure to follow security procedures.”

“We believe when everybody follows the procedures it protects everyone,” an ACE spokesman said. “When you fail to do so, it puts everyone at risk.”

By requiring employees to activate an alarm, ACE can deter insiders from participating in robberies. But the plaintiffs are not suspects and, according to their complaint, they did follow company procedures.

“As part of the company training,” the suit says,

Plaintiffs were told that if a robbery occurred at the store, [ ] they should cooperate with the robber because their lives were more important than the money. They were told to try and trigger an alarm if possible.

How ACE can argue it was “possible” for the plaintiffs to activate an alarm while in fear for their lives is as yet unclear.

By Matthew Heller
5/25/08