Two former Bayou La Batre housing authority employees at the center of a long-running civil suit over a $4.2 million retirement package say recent publicity around a scathing court order has poisoned the jury pool in Mobile County — and they want their trial moved out of the county, or at least a chance to question potential jurors more aggressively about what they have read.
In an Aug. 13 motion filed with Mobile County Circuit Judge Wesley Pipes, former executive director Virginia Huddleston and former employee Darryl Wilson asked the judge to reassign their case to another county or expand juror questioning after weeks of coverage of his own July 7 order, which voided their retirement agreements and described the payments as an “attempted fleecing of public money.”
“Extensive prejudicial pretrial publicity has created a substantial risk that Defendants cannot receive a fair and impartial trial before a Mobile County jury,” attorney John G. Scherf argued in the motion, which points to coverage from multiple local news outlets.
The claim against the coverage
At the heart of the motion is an accusation about where that publicity came from. Scherf accused Bayou La Batre Housing Authority Chairman Johnny Hatcher of making “prejudicial” comments and distributing copies of Pipes’ July 7 decision to local media.
“On July 8, 2026, current Bayou La Batre Housing Authority board member and Chairman, Johnny Hatcher, distributed a copy of the July 7, 2026, Order to local media and news agencies throughout Mobile County, Alabama,” the motion states.
The defendants point to phrases that have appeared in news reports — “attempted fleecing of public money,” “extravagantly excessive,” “unconscionable and illegal” and “windfall of epic proportions” — as examples of language they argue expresses conclusions about their conduct rather than neutral recitations of a ruling.
“These reports have repeated allegations of wrongdoing in language reasonably understood by the general public as expressing conclusions concerning Defendants’ conduct,” the motion states. The filing argues the sheer volume of coverage — newspaper reporting, television broadcasts, internet publications, social media posts and business pages, plus public commentary from housing authority officials — far exceeds routine news coverage, and that its timing ahead of trial makes an objective Mobile County jury impossible.
“Given the nature, timing of the dissemination before trial, and cumulative effect of this publicity, together with the localized public interest surrounding the Bayou La Batre Housing Authority suit, Defendants respectfully submit that the interest of justice requires transfer to another Alabama county where an impartial jury may be selected,” the motion concludes.
For its part, one local news organization has monitored the parallel civil and criminal cases from their inception and published its coverage of Pipes’ order independently of any party in the case. Pipes has set the civil jury trial for Oct. 19.
How the case got here
The dispute dates to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the City of Bayou La Batre used federal grant money to purchase property and develop affordable housing for residents displaced by the storm. In 2008, the city council authorized the incorporation of the Bayou La Batre Housing Authority as a public nonprofit corporation to oversee the development — a 99-unit complex known as Safe Harbor, built with a $15.7 million federal grant.
Huddleston was hired as executive director in 2013. That same year, Wilson resigned from the authority’s board and became its facilities manager. Over the following seven years, according to court records, a series of contract amendments steadily increased both of their pay. Between 2016 and 2020, Huddleston’s annual salary rose from $69,000 to $120,000, while Wilson’s rose from $31,200 to $80,000. The contracts also gave each of them 89 paid days off per year while requiring just 27 hours of work per week.
Then came the retirement amendments. In 2020, contract language promised Huddleston and Wilson combined lump-sum retirement payments of roughly $4.18 million — about $2.52 million for Huddleston and $1.66 million for Wilson — after about seven years of employment. The Housing Authority’s lawsuit alleges the payout could only have been funded by selling Safe Harbor, the authority’s only asset, and that the board had already voted in 2019 toward doing so. Court records show the properties were even listed with an auction company in 2020 before the scheme unraveled.
The Housing Authority sued in December 2020, accusing Huddleston, Wilson and several former board members of breaching fiduciary duties, conspiracy, conversion, negligence, wantonness, waste of corporate assets, misappropriation and unjust enrichment. A new leadership team, led by Hatcher, reviewed the contracts and referred the matter to court.
The July order
On July 7, Pipes granted the Housing Authority summary judgment on the couple’s claim to the $4,182,771 in promised retirement payments, ruling the agreements illegal, unconscionable and unenforceable. He found the contracts violated Alabama laws governing conflicts of interest and reasonable compensation at public and nonprofit entities, and that the former board violated the Alabama Open Meetings Act by discussing compensation in executive session before approving it publicly.
“It is incredible that the board of directors of a non-profit housing authority would enter into a contract with two seven-year employees to effectively hand them virtually all of the assets of the authority in the form of retirement,” Pipes wrote, calling the proposed payments a “windfall of epic proportions.”
Huddleston had defended the compensation during a deposition. Asked how her pay compared with other housing authorities, she testified: “I don’t have a clue and I don’t care. I know my worth and I’ve earned every penny of it.”
The July ruling voided the retirement agreements and rejected the couple’s claim to the money, but the broader civil case — including the Housing Authority’s claims of wrongdoing — remains pending before the same judge and the same Mobile County jury pool the defendants now say is compromised.
The criminal case, and what’s next
Huddleston also faced a separate criminal charge — third-degree theft, filed in 2022, related to flooring material purchased by the authority. That case was dismissed in September 2024 after the Housing Board declined to proceed with it, choosing instead to pursue the civil case.
The dispute has also generated collateral fights. A 2020 search of the couple’s home and the authority’s records became its own controversy when damaged computer equipment, missing documents and Hatcher’s presence during the search surfaced in court proceedings — a saga a different judge reviewed in 2025, concluding he could not determine whether missing documents had been given to Hatcher during the search.
Now the venue question will be decided by the same judge whose order the defendants say tainted the pool. Change-of-venue motions are rarely granted in Alabama civil cases; courts more often order expanded voir dire, with attorneys questioning each prospective juror individually about their exposure to news coverage. Scherf’s motion asks for either remedy. If Pipes denies both, the case goes to a Mobile County jury on Oct. 19 — five months shy of the lawsuit’s sixth anniversary.