STATIE NABS ANOTHER ONE
Troopergate cop books Worcester ADA on OUI charge
WESTBORO — The lawyer for a statie caught up in the Troopergate scandal says his client woke up “nervous” yesterday after signing off on an explosive report detailing the drunken driving arrest of a Worcester prosecutor.
Trooper Ryan Sceviour helped book Worcester Assistant District Attorney John A. O’Leary Monday night after his arrest for allegedly driving drunk with his 13-year-old daughter in the car.
O’Leary, 48, of Bolton, was suspended without pay yesterday after pleading not guilty in Westboro District Court to charges including operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, child endangerment while operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, and resisting arrest. The case has been handed over to Hampden County prosecutors.
Sceviour in October was ordered to scrub his report on the drunken and drugged driving arrest of a judge’s daughter. He is now suing his superiors.
“He was nervous, so he called me,” Attorney Leonard Kesten said of his conversation yesterday with Sceviour. “He knows he and the arresting trooper did the right thing, just like they do every day, and they wrote their report and included what the person said — the only time it was ever a problem was when they arrested a judge’s daughter.”
Sceviour, 29, is suing top state police commanders, saying he and trooper Ali Rei, 33, were reprimanded and threatened with suspension after initially refusing to edit embarrassing details out of an arrest report on Alli Bibaud, 30, the daughter of Dudley District Court Judge Tim Bibaud.
Kesten said yesterday he doesn’t understand why Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early’s Office, which claimed it had an ethical obligation to redact the embarrassing details from the Bibaud report, didn’t do the same for O’Leary. The O’Leary report details how he was “taunting” police by pretending he couldn’t hear them and “audibly snoring” after passing out in the barracks.
“In the Alli Bibaud case, there were three sentences that were redacted by the court and which the district attorney said they had an ethical obligation to redact. ... One of the statements was, ‘My father’s a judge,’” Kesten said. “In this report, it says he told them he was a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office in Worcester, which is identical language, essentially. It’s in the report, no one has redacted it, and my question is, ‘How come?’
“If the Worcester District Attorney’s Office says they have an ethical obligation to take out sensationalistic stuff from police reports, then why does this one say he fell asleep sitting up and snored?” Kesten said. “Are they going to take it out? When are they going to redact it? That’s my question: ‘What’s the difference?’ ”
Trooper Gregory Zanni reported he stopped O’Leary’s Audi A6 about 7:45 p.m. Monday on Route 140 in Shrewsbury after he saw him swerving between lanes and nearly hitting the guardrail on Interstate 290. When he activated his police lights, Zanni wrote that O’Leary “came to a complete stop in the center of the roadway,” forcing him to order him to the side of the road using his loudspeaker.
Zanni wrote that O’Leary, smelling of alcohol and slurring his words, failed several field sobriety tests and then became combative, refusing to get into the cruiser. He said he had to physically force O’Leary in by “pushing him and lifting his legs for him.”
Zanni said he asked Sceviour to help with the booking process after O’Leary refused to provide even basic information about himself. O’Leary later told troopers he was taking his daughter to a dance class in Boylston.
A family member who answered the door at O’Leary’s Bolton home yesterday said he wasn’t available for comment.
O’Leary was freed without bail. He is due back in court Feb. 2 for a pretrial hearing.
Kesten said the report shows his client is going to keep filing reports as he was trained to.
“The troopers are going to continue doing their jobs, regardless of these false claims that they shouldn’t be writing their reports this way,” Kesten said. “Any statements made by various people that the way he did it was improper — are completely false.”