Opinion ID: 149135
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Other Comparators

Text: One other driver, Tim Randolph, was reinstated by Matt Hoffman after an avoidable runaway accident. Cortez was not involved in the termination or the reinstatement, but Hoffman's participation in the reinstatement arguably suffices for a comparison to Medlock. But this comparison does not support Medlock's case, for the same reason the comparison to Thompson does not: the reason given for reinstating Randolph was his admission of error, which clearly distinguishes his situation from Medlock's. See Aplt.App. at 146. [8] The record shows one other avoidable runaway accident resulting in the termination-and-reinstatement of a driver, Terrence Galloway, in 2003. See id. at 434-35. While Medlock refers in passing to this incident, he does not include it in his set of comparables, and for good reason: the incident occurred before Cortez became Division Manager in 2006 and Hoffman became District Labor Manager in July 2005, so neither of the decision-makers in Medlock's case were involved. The rest of the comparables involve reckless accidents or failures to report accidents. Reinstatement was granted in the former cases based on the presence of external factors that negated or attenuated fault on the part of the driver, such as road and weather conditions, another motorist's excessive speed, and, in one instance, the union successfully argued that the driver had not been given proper training. See Aplt.App. 146-49. Such factors, not present in Medlock's case, present a legitimate basis for the reduction in discipline ultimately imposed on these drivers. In the failure-to-report category, drivers who had been terminated for non-traffic accidents were reinstated based on a lack of proof and, in one instance, the driver's claim that he had not been aware of the accident, see id. at 146-48. Such factors also were not present in Medlock's case. As alluded to earlier, UPS denied reinstatement to one driver, Dustin Prock, terminated for failure to report an accident, though a regional grievance committee later ordered his reinstatement. See id. at 149. We agree with UPS that this involuntary reinstatement does not support Medlock's case for pretext. See Hiatt v. Rockwell Int'l Corp., 26 F.3d 761, 771 (7th Cir.1994). On the contrary, the refusal to voluntarily reinstate the twenty-four year old Prock cuts against Medlock's claim that the decision to reinstate turned on an employee's age. There is one unexplained reinstatement decision, made before Cortez had arrived but after Hoffman had been made District Labor Manager. Brad Popejoy was terminated for failing to report an accident in September 2005, but reinstated by a grievance settlement for which UPS had insufficient data to identify the basis for settlement and who made the decision. See Aplt.App. at 147. This one factual gap in the record hardly creates a triable issue of pretext as to the reasons given for the decisions in all other Article 52 cases, including Medlocks'. To state the obvious, missing evidence, by definition, cannot establish facts that the evidence, if present, would have shown. The data insufficiency here demonstrates nothing more than we cannot say what the reasons were for reinstating Popejoy. To conclude somehow from this that Popejoy was reinstated for reasons that cast doubt on the justification for not reinstating Medlock would be sheer conjecture, which we have long recognized is an inadequate basis on which to oppose summary judgment, see, e.g., Hinds, 523 F.3d at 1198 n. 6 (quoting Branson v. Price River Coal Co., 853 F.2d 768, 771-72 (10th Cir.1988)). And while a tell-tale pattern of tactically missing data could perhaps warrant skepticism as to a limited set of data offered by an employer in support of its position, we have no such pattern here.