New report delays trial in Rye police brutality lawsuit

The trial in a brutality lawsuit against Rye police has been delayed after the discovery of a decade-old report that paints one of the accused officers as an abusive cop.

The report by Sgt. Alvin Ortiz was dated Dec. 16, 2004, four days after 17-year-old Andrew Caspi was injured during an early morning arrest. It focused on the behavior and reputation of one of the arresting officers, Anthony Rosace, known among teenagers around town as "the Terminator."

Ortiz was the supervisor that night and said he wished he had gotten to the scene earlier "to save (Caspi) from getting hurt." He arrived to find Caspi face down on the ground with Rosace and Officer Franco Compagnone on the teenager's back while handcuffing him.

"What disturbs me is that once again a young man has been hurt after having contact with P.O. Rosace," Ortiz wrote.

"There should not be a cloud of suspicion hanging over the department every time Rosace has contact with youngsters and some kid always ends up in the ER. This officer has got anger issues that are quite apparent to most people on this job but no one wants to talk about."

Police Lt. Robert Falk clTraims that he found the report – addressed to him in a sealed envelope marked "personal and confidential" inside a file folder – when he was going through boxes while moving offices in December. Inside the folder he also found a second report Ortiz wrote on Dec. 17 which didn't include his complaints about Rosace. Neither of Ortiz's reports had ever been turned over to Caspi's lawyers, although lawyers for the city and officers say police officials had never read the reports.

The teenager suffered a broken bone under his left eye, an injured collarbone, and some loosened teeth. He filed a $10 million lawsuit in 2007.

The trial had been scheduled to start Feb. 9 but U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff postponed it until early April. At a conference two weeks ago, he said the report was "one of the strongest memoranda I've ever seen in this kind of context" and that "some might characterize (it) as the smoking gun," according to a transcript obtained by The Journal News.

In the fall, U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel dismissed Caspi's so-called Monell claims against the city, former police Commissioner William Connors and Lt. Joseph Verille, leaving only the three officers at the scene – Rosace, Compagnone and Michael Anfuso – in the lawsuit. Seibel found she had no proof before her that Rosace had previously been abusive or that any policy maker had "turned a blind eye to such misfeasance."

But Caspi's lawyers, James Timko and Christopher Weddle, are now seeking to return the other defendants to the lawsuit, arguing that the Ortiz report is proof that city officials knew they had a problem cop but did nothing to curtail his behavior.

"The documents provide clear evidence that defendant Rosace had a history of unnecessarily injuring youth, that no investigations were conducted into those injuries and that City defendants' professed ignorance of any problems with defendant Rosace were false," Timko and Weddle wrote to Rakoff, adding that the failure to turn over Ortiz's reports amounted to a "cover-up."

Rakoff suggested that Falk's failure to file the report, not to mention open the envelope, might be a classic example of "deliberate indifference," a key standard in Monell claims, which can make municipalities liable for an employee's conduct.

But city lawyers contend the reports were never turned over because they had never been seen, likely because Ortiz did not give them to the records department, which would have led them to be electronically filed with other reports in the case.

"There was no willful or bad faith conduct on the part of anyone; two documents simply were not filed properly," Darius Chafizadeh, a lawyer representing the city, wrote in court papers.

Ortiz retired in 2007 and moved to Florida, where he now works as a court officer for the Broward County Sheriff's Office. He was never deposed in the lawsuit but was expected to be on Saturday. He declined to speak with a reporter.

Anthony Piscionere, Rosace's lawyer, said Friday that Ortiz' deposition would reveal that he had not been accurate in his report criticizing Rosace. But Piscionere refused to elaborate.

Caspi has described police at the time as "hyper-vigilant" about drinking parties, having been embarrassed the previous year by dozens of teenagers who refused for hours to let them into a Fulton Avenue home where they were trying to break up a party.

On the morning Caspi was arrested, Rosace confronted him after getting a report of a teenager walking on Post Road waving a tree branch at traffic. Soon Compagnone and Anfuso arrived. Caspi claimed he was walking to Rye Middle School to meet his father, who had driven out to pick him up because Andrew didn't want to walk all the way to their home on Kirby Lane.

Police said they believed Caspi had been drinking and he was accused of shoving Compagnone and running across the road. When Compagnone and Rosace caught up to him, they took him to the ground and handcuffed him. He claims he was then kicked and beaten before briefly blacking out.

Caspi was charged with assault, resisting arrest and obstruction of justice. The charges were eventually dismissed.

Twitter: @jonbandler