In August of 2019, court documents reportedly state that the employee, Kevin Berling, told his office manager that he did not want the company to throw him a birthday party because he said that “being the center of attention” would trigger his anxiety disorder and cause him to have a panic attack, something 18 percent of the American population deal with, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Despite the conversation, reports say that on August 7, the company threw him a surprise birthday party, which he found out about on his way to lunch. Berling reportedly suffered a panic attack and had to “leave the office suddenly and spend his lunch break in his car.”

According to Link NKY, Berling’s attorney, Tony Bucher, said, “The person who was responsible for the birthday parties who he talked to flat out forgot about his request. She didn’t do it to be mean. She said she would accommodate it and she just forgot.”

Berling met with the office manager the following day, and Bucher said, “According to [Berling], she started reading him the riot act and accused him of stealing other coworkers’ joy.”

This triggered another panic attack, Bucher stated to Link NKY. “At this point he starts employing other coping techniques that he’s worked on for years with his therapist,” Bucher said. “The way he described it is he started hugging himself and asked them to please stop.”

Berling was asked to leave the building, and the lawsuit states he was let go a few days later. “They [Gravity Diagnostic employees] believed he was enraged and possibly about to get violent,” Bucher said.

Bucher told Newsweek, “I will just say that I am very happy for my client. Few people will know how much courage it took for him to take this case all the way to trial.”

Berling sued Gravity Diagnostics for disability discrimination and retaliation, saying that the company inadequately accommodated his anxiety disorder. The birthday party, he said, caused him “to suffer from a loss of income and benefits and emotional distress and mental anxiety.”

The rewards totaled $450,000 in damages and included $300,000 for emotional distress and $150,000 for lost wages.

“More than the financial award, I believe that my client was so happy and relieved that the jury recognized that he was not some violent and menacing person,” Bucher said to Newsweek, “and that it was not okay for Gravity Diagnostics to just assume that he was without any evidence to support those misconceptions.”

Link NKY reported that Gravity Diagnostics founder and COO Julie Brazil said they plan on challenging the verdict.

“My employees deescalated the situation to get the plaintiff out of the building as quickly as possible while removing his access to the building, alerting me and sending out security reminders to ensure he could not access the building, which is exactly what they were supposed to do,” Brazil said.

“As an employer who puts our employee safety first, we have a zero-tolerance policy and we stand by our decision to terminate the plaintiff for his violation of our workplace violence policy,” Brazil told Link NKY. “My employees were the victims in this case, not the plaintiff.”

Berling’s lawyer disagrees.

“They made assumptions that he was dangerous based off of his disability and not off of any evidence that he was violent,” he told Link NKY.

Surprise birthday parties go awry more often than it seems but hardly ever end in a lawsuit. A woman was praised online for walking out of her own surprise party after her friends and family played a “cruel” prank on her.

A man last November frightened his guests after pulling a gun on them as they attempted to surprise him with a party in his home.

But in a much more lighthearted incident, in February, a dad got the internet’s attention after he reacted to his son surprising him and his wife in Hawaii for his birthday.

Newsweek reached out to Gravity Diagnostics for additional comment.