New Seaside Park police problems rise from a troubled past

This is a part of “Protecting The Shield” – a two-year Asbury Park Press investigation that probes gaps in police accountability, which can harm citizens and cost New Jersey taxpayers millions of dollars. This story, originally published on Jan. 22, has been updated to reflect the latest police issues within the borough.

SEASIDE PARK – A decade ago, the borough’s largest concert venue was a battle line.

The Green Room at the Sawmill Café restaurant brought in hundreds of out-of-town visitors, creating what the current police chief called a “party-like atmosphere.” But the Green Room’s former owner claimed the borough establishment wanted him gone because he was booking “black bands” in a town that bills itself as “The Family Resort.”

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At the forefront of the battle were the police. After years of peace, they are facing two new federal lawsuits – one from a former suspect, another from one of their own.

Seventeen men and women filed a total of 15 lawsuits – 14 federal, one state – accusing police of beating or improperly arresting them, many at or near the Green Room, between 2004 and 2007, an Asbury Park Press investigation found. Now, 10 years later, the Green Room is gone, but at a cost of $5.5 million to taxpayers: $3 million in excessive force lawsuit settlements and $2.5 million to the former Green Room operator, Stephen D’Onofrio.

D’Onofrio eventually sold the business, claiming in his lawsuit that the police, the Borough Council, a former mayor, the planning and zoning boards, both borough political parties and a taxpayers’ association – with help from code enforcement officials – all conspired to try to close the Green Room.

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D’Onofrio said they called the plan “the Program.” It was a sophisticated mechanism for applying pressure to reticent business owners – a pattern of erroneous inspections, citations and enforcement actions, according to his suit. The borough denied D’Onofrio’s allegations in its official response to the lawsuit.

More recently, Thomas Schiermeyer, a former police recruit and later a Class II part-time police officer, has sued a borough police detective sergeant, Matthew Brady, for allegedly bullying Schiermeyer for more than a year. Brady is also facing criminal charges for allegedly pointing a gun at Schiermeyer, on Nov. 15, 2016.

Another man, Mouaid Homsi, has claimed in another federal lawsuit that borough police used excessive force when arresting him in May 2014.

Seaside Park is a 0.7-square-mile town situated between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. Its residential population of 1,579, which is 97 percent white, swells to many thousands during the summer tourism season.

From 2004 through 2007, visitors claimed that the police: aggravated a chronic back injury; caused a groin injury; pushed a cut face into sand and then pepper sprayed the person; slammed heads into filing cabinets and cell doors; beat men while already on the ground or unconscious; forced a woman to sit handcuffed with her breast exposed; used choke holds and pepper spray; and punched or kicked suspects who were already on the ground, according to the lawsuits.

Twelve of the 14 federal suits and the state suit were settled without admission of wrongdoing by police or the borough. One was dismissed. A federal jury in 2007 found two officers liable in the one suit for falsifying documents. One of the two officers was also found liable for using excessive force.

Of 13 full-time officers employed by the department, 11 have been sued in federal court on claims of civil rights violation since 2004. The borough denied its police officers ever used excessive force. It has never made any admission of wrongdoing.

In a 2017 interview – before the allegations against Brady came to light – borough police Chief Francis Larkin said the area around the Sawmill had been “hostile,” but that the borough is now a “family resort.”

Conspiracy or not, the borough no longer has the Green Room concert hall.

“It’s really, you know, really changed around a bit,” Larkin said.

The Sawmill’s current general manager, Ron Rinaldi, echoed those sentiments. “Then, it was a nightclub. Now, it’s a family restaurant,” he told the Asbury Park Press.

There are still concerts in Seaside Park, some held on the police department’s lawn. The summer 2017 lineup prominently featured rock and oldies bands from along the Jersey Shore.

D.J. D’Onofrio, Stephen’s brother, runs a trust that now owns the Sawmill, which remains a massive compound at the southern end of the borough’s developed section of boardwalk.

Rinaldi said relations with borough police could not be better.

“That’s history, I don’t want to get into what happened then,” Rinaldi said of the era of lawsuits. “I can just tell you, right now, we have a great relationship with the township, the mayor, the Council and the police chief, for the past eight years, nine years. And of course, without their cooperation, all this couldn’t have been done.”

“All this” refers to the reborn Sawmill – the new express pizzeria, the al fresco dining, the tiki bar, a pastel-painted banquet hall where the Green Room once was, and gleaming kitchen equipment where the stage once stood.

Stephen D’Onofrio said he did not want to revisit the allegations that led to the borough’s $2.5 million settlement with him. One of those allegations – which the borough denied – was that borough officials objected to him booking “black bands,” beginning when he booked hip hop artist Method Man in April 2004 and began attracting audiences more diverse than the borough.

Larkin said that race has never been an issue for his officers.

“I don’t think race played into it at all,” Larkin said of police activity around the Sawmill in the 2000s. “I know that there were accusations of race with the different bands … for us it wasn’t about race at all.”

For borough police, Larkin said, the only issue was the “party-like atmosphere” the Green Room created.

Although the 13 full-time officers were white, “We do try to hire blacks, Hispanics, we try to get females on our rolls, and we make that up through our summer (part-time) officers,” Larkin said.

The chief said there had never been a “sustained” complaint of excessive force, then or now.

“When our officers were up there around bar closing time, it was very hostile for them,” he said.

Calm in recent years

The concert hall had opened in 2003 in the newly renovated Sawmill, which D’Onofrio had owned since 1977. Larkin said everything turned around once the Green Room closed in 2009.

Since then, Larkin has presided over a period of relative calm for the borough police department.

To illustrate his point about the Green Room, Larkin noted the police department’s arrest statistics in the borough – 235 in 2005 and 278 in 2006 down to only 145 in 2016.

Most of the men and women who sued police over excessive force a decade ago declined to discuss their cases today.

A common component of settlement agreements is language forbidding any discussion of the terms of the settlements or the lawsuits that led to them.

One former plaintiff, though, did discuss his ordeal that affects him to this day.

Dean Hughes, 52, of Brick, said he still suffers from injuries sustained during his December 2004 arrest in Seaside Park.

He had been escorting his brother out of the Sawmill at a bouncer’s request when other bouncers jumped him, he told the Press. He was able to hold off several of them before one bouncer tackled him from the side, injuring his back.

When police arrived, he was in so much pain he had to be handcuffed with his hands in front of rather than behind him, he said. That did not stop the officers from dragging him by his hands and belt loops and giving him a deliberately stop-and-go ride to headquarters, he said.

“The officer driving the car kept saying, ‘Your back hurts?’ and kept slamming on the brakes,” he recalled. “I was in so much pain I could barely breathe.”

In his lawsuit, Hughes claimed that the officers who arrested him “purposely applied the brakes of the patrol car in response to [his] request for medical treatment, causing him additional back pain.”

When they pulled him out of the cruiser at police headquarters, he told the Press, the punching began. His lawsuit also claimed that police “struck [him] repeatedly and dragged him out of the patrol car into headquarters,” where he “was kicked and verbally abused” by police officers.

“I was out cold,” he said. He woke up handcuffed to a bench inside.

Police charged Hughes with aggravated assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct – “fabricated charges,” according to the lawsuit he filed in 2006. He ultimately pleaded guilty only to disorderly conduct which, he told the Press, was fair enough, given that he fought with bouncers. Now he steers clear of Seaside Park, he said.

The borough denied all of Hughes’ allegations – false arrest, the application of brakes, the repeated strikes and abuse of the legal process – in a response to his complaint.

Cops were in a ‘hostile environment’

Larkin was the internal affairs investigator during the tumultuous years after the Sawmill finished its expansion in 2003. He said the cops in question were just caught up in a violent environment.

“I don’t think there’s any culture of continued excessive force at all,” Larkin said. “I know there’s not, and I know there’s not here.”

Culture or no, a federal civil trial jury ruled in February 2007 that then-police Sgt. James Citta had used excessive force against Jose Roman and that Citta and then-Sgt. James Boag had falsified records in a November 2003 arrest near the Sawmill.

Roman, 28 at the time and living in Seaside Park, had gone to the Sawmill with two sisters, then-23-year-old Melissa Bruno of Waretown and then-26-year-old Melanie Bruno of Manchester, as well as other friends. Bouncers kicked out the Brunos, and police arrested all three. Their attorney claimed in the suit that police had pushed Roman’s head into a filing cabinet, knocking him out, and forced Melanie Bruno to sit handcuffed with a breast exposed at the police station.

Police then dragged the unconscious Roman to a cell, “slammed” his head into the cell door, threw him in and, when he came to, kicked him in the head and face, according to the complaint.

Attorneys for the borough denied the violence and the ripped top in court filings.

The jury, though, found the borough liable and awarded Roman and the Brunos $600,000.

Citta was the department’s use-of-force instructor. He was frequently named as a defendant because of that role, and for his direct involvement in some of the arrests. He remained at work after the trial, but later retired on a disability pension – and then sued the borough, alleging that police supervisors had discriminated against him because of his weight and had retaliated against him over union and other issues. A federal court dismissed Citta’s lawsuit.

Public records show he holds an inactive insurance agent’s license registered to the address of a Toms River bail bonds and private investigation agency. The office was vacant when reporters visited. He has not returned messages left at various business numbers.

Cutting losses?

D’Onofrio’s $2.5 million settlement in January 2013 was the climax of the Seaside Park’s long season of lawsuits.

For the first time since 2004, the borough was not fighting a federal lawsuit.

The final price tag of nine years of litigation: $5.5 million.

Larkin said that, when the borough and its insurance carrier pay a settlement, it’s a question of avoiding a more expensive, drawn-out court battle.

“It’s so costly to defend these cases,” Larkin said. “There’s always been a hop-off point because of the cost factor involved.”

“It’s a shame that money became part of the whole formula because it would be nice to go forward all the way and show that there was no excessive force used on the part of the officer,” Larkin said. “That, I always thought that there was something wrong with that.”

Civil rights attorneys agree that settlements are frequently in their clients’ best interests but reject the notion that excessive force lawsuits are baseless.

Thomas Mallon, a Freehold attorney who estimates he has handled 150 police brutality cases in 15 years, says police departments can build up cultures of using and excusing excessive force, passing it down from veteran officers to rookies.

Between 2004 and 2007 Mallon filed six of the 14 federal lawsuits against Seaside Park on behalf of men and women who claimed that police beat them or placed them under false arrest. Mallon said he could not discuss individual settlements or municipalities, and spoke in general terms based on his experience. The suits Mallon filed all settled, for a total of more than $1.5 million.

“In the departments where I’ve seen a culture of this type of behavior, where it’s accepted, what happens is the brass … the chiefs and captains and people in charge of internal affairs, they buy this baloney and they accept these stories that just don’t make any sense,” Mallon said. “They ignore obvious evidence that their officers used excessive force, that their officers were in the wrong.”

The ‘Program’

D’Onofrio took his accusations much further than excessive force. Police running roughshod over tourists was just one component of a policy of running “the Program” to drum out businesses that did not gel with the borough’s image.

Below are D’Onofrio allegations in his 2009 civil complaint, filed by Attorney Philip A. Davolos. The borough denied in legal papers that there was any organized incursion into the Sawmill, and admitted only that “various citations were issued to and/or at the SawMill Café regarding underage drinking and other matters at various times.”

The trouble began after a concert by rapper Method Man in April 2004. That concert and others drew “ethnically diverse” audiences in contrast to the “decidedly homogenous” year-round population of the borough.

Since D’Onofrio refused to “racially vet the performers at the Sawmill,” the township establishment “embarked on a five-year campaign of extortionate and fraudulent activity that violated plaintiff’s civil rights and destroyed plaintiff’s business.” The borough denied the “campaign” and its alleged basis in court documents.

After the Method Man concert, undercover officers suddenly began working the Sawmill late at night on weekends, and at times “interrogated and harassed” patrons and employees. They would also troll for underage patrons drinking alcohol, but would only issue them costly municipal fines rather than turning them or the bar over to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

D’Onofrio eventually told Sgt. Bryan McKay – who is now an internal affairs investigator for the department – that he was getting uncomfortable with police in his bar.

“You worry too much,” McKay told him. “These tickets are $250 each.”

D’Onofrio took that “to mean that the ‘tickets’ were a good ‘moneymaker’ for Seaside Park,” the suit claimed.

D’Onofrio then found himself the target of code violation citations and expensive new special conditions on renewals for his liquor license.

The borough went so far as to hire a construction official “in exchange for the promise that he would use his position … to shut down the Sawmill,” the suit claimed. The borough denied any such bargain in court papers.

Borough officials implied the sudden flurry of fines, fees and red tape would blow away if he stopped bringing “black bands” to the borough. He refused, but ended up selling the restaurant. The borough denied any such implication and denied that it had anything called the “Program” or that it wanted to bankrupt businesses it didn’t like.

When the borough settled D’Onofrio’s suit for $2.5 million, it made no admission of wrongdoing.

Today, D’Onofrio does not discuss the old days, at least not with the media.

Like current Sawmill manager Rinaldi, D’Onofrio calls past events “history.”

So does Kevin Kopacko, Rinaldi’s predecessor. The former general manager at the Sawmill got a $250,000 settlement of his own. The borough made no admission of wrongdoing.

Kopacko sued the borough and the police after he said Citta and other officers “assaulted” him after he videotaped their behavior at the Sawmill. In court filings, the borough denied its officers had done anything wrong.

Like Larkin’s assertions on the character of the borough, Rinaldi says the Sawmill is now geared to families, and “we get along great with the police.”

The chief agrees.

“We are the family resort,” he said. “We want to be the family resort.”

Alex N. Gecan: @GeeksterTweets; 732-643-4043; agecan@gannettnj.com

Contributing: Jean Mikle