NYPD COPS’ VICTIMS
The city’s hefty payouts for NYPD misconduct suits over the past five years went to a range of plaintiffs that include a Westchester woman whose teeth got knocked out during a traffic stop and a petite hairdresser tossed to the street by a hulking cop, The Post has learned.
The city paid Elaheh Akhavan of Scarsdale $1.5 million over the 2014 dental-damaging incident, during which court papers say her jaw was also fractured by cop Chun Kyu Yun.
According to her Manhattan Supreme Court suit, Akhavan, then 63, was driving home when Yun stopped her on East 96th Street near the FDR Drive and pulled her out of her car.
Yun allegedly threw Akhavan face-first into a curb, then put his knee on her back and handcuffed her, smashing her face into the pavement before charging her with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration — counts that were later dismissed.
Her settlement is among more than 5,800 listed in a spreadsheet posted online by the Law Department under terms of a law signed by Mayor de Blasio last year.
A Post analysis of the data shows the city paid $384.1 million to settle more than half of the misconduct suits filed against the NYPD during fiscal 2014-2018. The settlements typically don’t include any admission of police wrongdoing.
One of the payouts went to New Jersey hairdresser Jennifer Chin-Fong, whose Manhattan federal court suit says she was “brutally ripped” out of her car by NYPD cop Bryan White following a 2012 fender bender on East 82nd Street in Manhattan.
Court papers say White threw Chin-Fong, then 62, to the pavement, causing a concussion, then falsely charged her with obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct “to try to justify his outrageous conduct.”
Court papers note that ChinFong is 4 feet, 9 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds at the time, while White was “well over 6feet tall and 200 pounds.”
The city settled with ChinFong for $500,000.
Other cases that were quietly settled include a Manhattan federal court suit filed by Kiran Neppalli, who was a newlywed accountant living in New Jersey when he visited the city to celebrate a friend’s birthday in 2012.
After leaving the Brass Monkey bar in the Meatpacking District, Neppalli’s wife was harassed by a group of young men, according to Neppalli’s lawyer, Jonathan Sims.
Neppalli’s younger brother confronted the group. When Neppalli went to break up the dispute, undercover cop Isaac Branch allegedly came up from behind and clobbered him with a collapsible metal baton, fracturing his eye socket and causing bleeding on his brain.
Both Neppalli and his brother were arrested on charges that were later dismissed, Sims said.
Neppalli, who got a $950,000 settlement and now lives in Santa Monica, Calif., said his only memory of the incident is “being woken in the ambulance because they were cutting my eyelid open.”
Neppalli, 41, said he suffered “severe headaches for almost two years” and is still seeing a therapist for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.
Another sizable sum went to Benjamin Rosenberg, a former carpet-company manager and synagogue cantor who was mowed down by a riderless motorcycle while crossing a Bronx intersection in 2015.
Court papers say the bike spun out of control when it was “deliberately” rammed by NYPD cop Luis Rios while he chased a group of motorcycle riders.
Both Rios and another cop in the police cruiser claimed it never touched the bike’s rear tire, “but we found two wit- nesses who were in the pack of the motorcyclists who saw the contact,” said Rosenberg’s lawyer, Scott Epstein.
Rosenberg, who suffered a fractured neck and extensive injuries to his legs, settled his Bronx Supreme Court suit for $1 million in July 2017.
De Blasio on Tuesday said the city had “seen a real reduction” in frivolous police-misconduct suits since he ordered a crackdown on filings by “ambulancechasing lawyers” in 2015, but added: “There’s always going to be settlements . . . I think we have more to do.”
The NYPD didn’t return a request for comment.