KID’S GOOD-COP, BAD-COP TALE
Says he got a break for graffiti from 1 officer, busted & cuffed by 2nd
A Queens teen promised a pass after spraying phallic graffiti in a local park landed in handcuffs despite the agreement with a local cop to simply paint over his handiwork, according to the youth and his mom.
Jeremiah Mars, 13, recounted entering the 108th Precinct stationhouse after he was identified for defacing the local basketball court, with his mother and the officer signing off on a community service-type deal where her son would return to the park on May 7 to cover up the graffiti left four days earlier.
Both Jeremiah and his mom Novella Mars, 32, were painting at the park Saturday as she continued to fume over the incident.
“We want to trust the cops, we want to have the relationship,” she said. “But where did the communication go wrong?”
Mars turned up at the precinct around 4 p.m. on May 4 to work out the details of the deal, but says he instead wound up inside an interrogation room and then cuffed to the bars of a holding cell while waiting for police to contact his mother.
“They said I was under arrest and I couldn’t use their phone,” Mars told the Daily News. “I was under arrest until my mom came to pick me up. [The handcuff] was tight ... I was just thinking, ‘Like, what I am going to do?’ ”
Police said the youth was never arrested and never placed in handcuffs, with only a juvenile report prepared in the case. But the teen said he was brought into a room with three or four officers.
“I didn’t want to speak with him,” the youth said of the first officer to address him. “He really took me into like an interrogation room and he started asking me questions.”
A precinct youth officer who made the deal for Mars to paint over the graffiti was removed from his position over the incident, according to a police source.
It all started with a Facebook posting about graffiti scrawled on the basketball courts at Hunter’s Point South Park, according to the NYPD.
Two officers dispatched to the park spotted Mars, wearing the same red jacket as the teen in the social media post.
Mars was reportedly told the whole thing would disappear if he returned to the park and painted over the graffiti, law enforcement sources said, only to later learn the deal was off. A police source confirmed only that a “juvenile report” was recorded after Mars voluntarily walked into the precinct.
His still-angry mother said she was contacted by police about an emergency and summoned to the precinct, where her son was held inside a room. He was eventually released into her custody
after Novella Mars hopped into a cab and headed directly to the precinct.
“I don’t ever want him to ever have a fear to walk into a precinct to ask questions, and then him asking questions makes him get interrogated for something,” said the frustrated mother. “They could have easily called me and said, ‘Hey mom, can we speak to your son? ’”