Suit: I Got Canned After Taking Time Off for Dying Daughter

Last year, Michigan's Terri Estepp tapped into the Family and Medical Leave Act to take time off from her job at Huntington Bank to tend to her 31-year-old daughter, Samantha, who was dying of breast cancer in California. Now, Estepp is suing her former employer, which she says fired her just days before her daughter died, per ClickOnDetroit.com. In her federal complaint filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Estepp says that at first she burned through her available PTO (paid time off), which she had accrued a lot of in her almost 30 years of employment with the bank. "I had plenty of time," says Estepp, a branch manager at the Huntington Bank in Howell.

However, as her daughter's condition deteriorated, the 51-year-old had to take advantage of the FMLA, which allows workers to take up to 12 weeks per year of unpaid leave to serve as a caregiver for a sick spouse, child, or parent. At one point, Estepp took off about a month to be with Samantha—and then asked for more time off when she returned. That was when the bank reportedly canned her. "They fired me on a Tuesday [and Samantha] passed away on the following Friday," she says, adding that she wasn't given a reason for her pink slip. She also says in her complaint that her personnel file is "filled with decades of performance reviews" that would show what a good employee she'd been, per Law & Crime.

Her 2023 review, for instance, called Estepp "an exceptional role model" who often "went above and beyond" for her staff and customers, per the suit. Huntington Bank says it "acted appropriately" in Estepp's case and that her firing "was unrelated to an FMLA leave of absence." Still, attorney Jon Marko suggests that it probably wasn't a great idea for the bank to let Estepp go in such murky circumstances. "Let's say an employee comes back from FMLA and they punch their co-worker in the face because they're having a bad day—as a good employer, you're probably going to be able to easily terminate and justify that termination," he tells CBS. "But if somebody comes back from work from FMLA and a day later they're fired for no really good reason, that employer is going to have a problem." (More Huntington Bank stories.)