No reason to be stopped in his car
TYLER FELIX knows Sgt. David Grieco by his nickname, Bullethead. They are not friends. Felix, a 34-year-old Uber driver, is still stinging from a car stop in East New York nearly six years ago that prompted him to file a report with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
At first, it looked like the complaint would go nowhere.
Felix knew Grieco only by his nickname, and a CCRB case investigator told him the NYPD had no record of a car stop about 1 a.m. on July 14, 2012, in the area he described.
There was a good reason the CCRB couldn’t find Felix’s encounter with Grieco — the cop never recorded it in his memo book, according to CCRB records obtained by the Daily News.
Felix’s complaint stalled — until he saw a picture in The News about Grieco, who was then under investigation by the Internal Affairs Bureau for an unrelated case. Although Felix accurately described Grieco and the other cops with him, the CCRB couldn’t substantiate the allegation of an unjustified stop.
Instead, the three officers were only cited for failing to maintain their memo books, The News has learned— but it’s not clear they suffered any penalty for breaking protocol.
Felix said officers “humiliated” him during the traffic stop.
“I went up to their car to get (my license). Grieco was in the passenger seat and he had it in his hand, but they kept pulling away as I went to grab it. Finally after the third time I grabbed it, but he held on and he goes, ‘Yo, relax out here,’” Felix said.