The only notice Elmo Taylor got, he remembers, was a phone call.

Taylor, a shelter worker at the Family and Adult Service Center in Belltown, was at Wal-Mart, buying a DVD to screen for the 60 or so visitors to the Belltown day center.

He would bring in a new film “to keep them current” on the world of cinema, he says. The news on the other end of the line snapped him back into the here and now.

“I’m sorry to tell you, but your services are no longer needed,” he heard his supervisor say.

Taylor and Ed Cozart, another of three African-American employees discharged that day, have filed complaints with the city’s Office of Civil Rights over their abrupt dismissals.

Washington employers can fire staff at any time without providing a reason, and neither Cozart nor Taylor were provided with one. But administrators of the center claimed employees were using the place to stow and sell drugs.

Both men deny they possessed or sold contraband out of the agency’s offices, and there’s little evidence indicating otherwise. Neither was charged with any crime. The police have no record that narcotics or a weapon were found onsite, as the center’s management contended [“Drop In, Dropped: Day center closes due to drug allegations,” Feb. 14]. And those responsible for the firing are gone: another nonprofit organization has taken over the center’s management.

Taylor says news of the firing has injured his reputation.

“They slandered me,” says the 53–year-old hairstylist. “I don’t sell drugs, I have a career.”

Lois Summers served lunch with Cozart during a weekly volunteer gig. Summers has volunteered at FASC for 28 years.

“Some of the guys who worked in [Cozart’s] position didn’t give a darn about the people who came in there. Ed cared about them if they came in sopping wet or something. He’s got a big heart.”

A dozen clients at the center contacted Real Change to vouch for Cozart, the longest-serving employee at the time of his dismissal.

Two fellow employees filed a restraining order against Cozart and Taylor shortly after their dismissal. A police incident report written on the day of his firing noted that a manager at the center cited “a verbal incident” between Cozart and another employee that “was very surprising and unnerving.” The manager worried that Cozart “may become violent when his employment is terminated.”

“I’m 47 years old and have never in my life been in a fight,” says Cozart. “I don’t know why she felt that way.”

A King County judge found the restraining orders against Cozart and Taylor to be without merit and revoked them.

After the firings, FASC closed down for its day operations for a six-week remodeling period. The drop-in center reopened March 12, and professional social-service workers have been hired on. They filled jobs once taken by steady clients paid a $25 daily “stipend.”

New manager MJ Kiser refused to comment directly on the firing of the two men. She did say that the old peer-hiring system was great in theory, but raised questions of fairness in practice — as when, for example, those in charge would bend the rules to admit friends to the center when it was over capacity. “You try to guard against favoritism,” she says.

For Cozart, the manner of his firing is still a source of pain. The day-shift worker has since heard that drug dealing was a problem at the center during the night. “If they’re selling drugs at night, why single me out?”

And management also threw out Cozart’s brand-new golf bag and pair of golf shoes that he had stowed in the locker where the drugs were supposedly found.

“How can you say you didn’t know who they belonged to, when you say [a backpack containing drugs] in there belonged to me?

And he misses his job and the center’s users.

“I loved those people,” he says.