Ex-cop says excessive force complaint against Nucera got squashed
BORDENTOWN >> He hasn’t talked about this in almost 20 years.
“I ignored you for a long time,” former Bordentown cop Evan Jones says. “And I’m not real comfortable being here right now.”
Jones is sitting with his friend, John Taylor, another former cop who worked under Frank Nucera, in a booth inside the Town and Country Diner. They’re sipping beers from glasses as Jones calms his nerves.
In township cop circles, Jones is a legend and a cautionary tale about what happens when you cross Nucera. He’s the original Nathan Roohr, the Bordentown cop credited with piercing the blue wall of silence, but without the ending where the elusive Nucera ends up in handcuffs, facing his day in court.
Jones was a “mental mess” for years, he admits, after he says the “criminally evil” Nucera got even with him for “doing the right thing” following that fateful night in August 2000.
The only reason Jones showed up at the diner on this day was because his name kept coming up. A stroke of poetic justice, Roohr name-dropped Jones on a recording played at Nucera’s hate-crime trial.
The police dog handler worried he’d be the “next Evan Jones” if Detective Sgt. Salvatore Guido didn’t remember the police chief slamming Timothy Stroye’s head into a door jamb at the Ramada Inn in September 2016.
“I give Nate Roohr all the credit in the world,” Jones says. “I tossed a coin up there to see if it was going to fly. It didn’t fly, and I’m not making light of it. But I had faith in the system. I lost a lot of faith. I had a lot of faith in Jim Gerrow. ... have absolutely zero respect for him.
“I laughed when I read your article. I’m crackin’ up. ‘Oh, I don’t recall that.’ Are you kidding me? You know what? I wasn’t some police officer who Jim contacted that one time only. I worked major trials with him … when I worked for the prosecutor’s office. I knew Jim [James] Gerrow very well. He knows me very well. So for him to say, ‘Oh, I don’t recall that,’ I look at that as a fabrication for a very convenient amnesia.”
Jones worked for the Bordentown Township Police from 1993 until, officially, 2002. He spent the better part of the last two years on stress leave after being forced out of the department when he filed an excessive force complaint saying he witnessed Nucera, then a lieutenant, kick a handcuffed suspect and kneel on his neck during a buy-bust operation in 2000, set up by then-Detective Brian Pesce.
Jones went to the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office with his allegations. The case was investigated and closed without criminal or administrative charges brought against Nucera, according to court filings. Jones and other cops believe the fix was in because Nucera was a prospective
witness in a highprofile criminal case involving two state troopers who opened fire on a van of minorities in 1998.
“What’s very convenient with a lot of stuff that goes on with this man is nobody sees him,” Jones said. “Everybody’s scared to step up. I had Sal Guido tell me something after Frank got arrested for what he’s on trial now and said, ‘I should have stood up when it was going on.’ He said, ‘But I have a family.’ I said, ‘I didn’t have a family. My youngest son was 18 months old when this went down.’ I have principles, and morals, and ethics, and I believed in the system we have in this country.”
‘Drug Rip’
Pesce, now the township chief, recounted for FBI special agents during an interview setting up the “drug rip,” according to court filings.
The suspect, Lawrence Driver Jr., of Trenton, was involved in an Ecstasy deal in the parking lot of the Bradlees department store, which is in the same shopping Center as Shoprite, off Route 206. Driver was involved in a “mini pursuit” with township police, Pesce said.
Jones, then a K-9 officer, was working his regular 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift that night. One of the backup officers in the buy-bust operation, Jones was with his police dog in his cruiser waiting for the drug swap to go down so cops could swoop in.
It was a busy night. Patrons walked through the parking lot, in and out of the store. Others loaded groceries into vehicles.
Jones’ police report, obtained by The Trentonian through a public records request, says cops received intelligence from a confidential informant that Driver was bringing “large quantities of Ecstasy” into the township and set up a drug deal for Aug. 18, 2000 in the shopping center plaza.
Cops staked out the parking lot. Driver arrived around 8:45 p.m., in a Blue Chevy Monte Carlo, and met with the confidential informant as police watched, according to the police report.
A police officer approached Driver, who was seated in the vehicle. Driver pushed the officer “in the hands and chest” and drove off, the police report says.
Nucera, working an offduty overtime assignment at the grocery store, ordered Driver to stop, according to the police report, but Driver accelerated in Nucera’s direction, forcing him to “jump out” of the way.
Jones remembered Nucera threw his flashlight through the suspect’s windshield — a detail that didn’t appear in the report, which referred to another investigative report with “full details.” The township refused to turn over that report claiming it was was an “investigatory” record exempt from disclosure under the Open Public Records Act.
Driver eluded backup officers who attempted to pull him over, and struck a parked car during the pursuit, according to the police report.
Driver was headed for the Route 206 entrance to try to escape, Jones said during the interview, so he blocked it. Jones said he positioned his cruiser, equipped with a malfunctioning dashboard camera, nose-to-nose with Driver’s car.
Jones said he believed his dash-cam video would have captured the incident with Driver. But due to an electrical issue, it wasn’t on that night.
Jones says he had written up “pink slips,” the repair tickets, and submitted them to Nucera at least a half-dozen times but the dash-cam problem never got fixed before the buybust operation.
Jones remembered seeing a huge hole in the driver’s windshield, from when Nucera threw his flashlight through it.
“I don’t know whether someone shot in his car,” Jones said. “I was going to shoot this kid because this joker throws a flashlight through the car. It was a classic clusterf*ck.”
Jones and another patrolman, Mark Costner, struggled to get Driver out of the vehicle. After they finally pulled him out, Jones handcuffed Driver, who was prone and not resisting, when Nucera came out of nowhere and booted the handcuffed suspect in the shoulder, Jones said.
Then Nucera knelt on Driver’s neck and screamed at him, Jones said.
“You don’t kick people in handcuffs,” he said. “The kid was just sitting there. He never physically fought with us. This kid was scared sh*tless. Just a dumb kid. It was over $20 worth of Ecstasy.”
Cops recovered nine Ecstasy pills that Driver threw out the window during the chase, according to the report.
Write It Up
When Nucera returned to his overtime detail, Jones helped Driver over to an awaiting patrol car. Jones looked at Michael Crawford (now deceased), the sergeant on duty.
“Mike said, ‘What’s the problem?’ So I told him what was going on. He said, ‘Well, you have to write it.’ I said, ‘I know I have to write it,’” Jones said.
After his tour, Jones went back to the police station and wrote up an excessive force complaint against Nucera and left it in then-chief Dan Kiernan’s mailbox.
“The next time I worked, Dan Kiernan called me in and said, ‘Do you really have to do this? You want me to send this to the county?’” Jones said. “I said, ‘Yeah. It is what it is.’ He said, ‘OK.’ He doesn’t have a choice.”
Pesce told the FBI he wasn’t in position to see Nucera kick Driver, according to the court filings. He described Jones as an “honest person and a good police officer.”
Jones said he never second-guessed filing the misconduct complaint against Nucera because it was the “right thing to do.”
Within a week, he got called in for an interview with detectives from the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office. Jones remembered going down to the Burlington County courthouse on 49 Rancocas Drive in Mount Holly, where the prosecutor’s office was located.
Inside the plain, secondfloor interrogation room was a small table and chairs where he sat and spoke with two detectives four about an hour. He couldn’t remember the name of the female in
vestigator but recalled Leon Brodowski, a retired state trooper, was the other detective in the room.
Brodowski didn’t respond to a phone call at a listed number and an emailed request for comment bounced back.
Pesce told the FBI that Detective Debra Leitenberger, a lieutenant in charge of special investigations unit at the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office, was the female investigator who Jones couldn’t remember. Leitenberger and a BCPO spokesman declined to comment.
Jones said he gave the investigators the blow-by-blow recounted in his complaint.
“Same thing I told them in my report,” he said. “This is all true.”
The detectives didn’t press him up, Jones says. He never got the impression they didn’t believe him. He continued going to work, like normal, until the beginning of October, when things went downhill.
“I was getting a lot of pressure from within the department,” he said. “Didn’t matter what I did. I got warned about my reports weren’t done on time. Just basically all the Mickey Mouse harassment crap.”
Jones went in for a second interview with the BCPO investigators later that month. The detectives’ demeanor and questions were different this time.
Jones got the impression the investigators interviewed Nucera and others cops and that Costner, the only other cop who was in position to see Nucera kick and kneel on Driver, did not back him up. Costner did not respond to a message sent to him through Facebook seeking comment.
“They’re like, ‘This didn’t really happen this way.’ I said, ‘Really? Not how I recall it. I understand what’s going on here. I get it,’” Jones said.
Roohr testified at the trial that one of the investigators in the Nucera excessive force probe “walked out of the interview, winked at Nucera and said everything was going to be OK. Everything was OK for Nucera. It wasn’t for the officer.”
The Nucera excessive force probe ended before Roohr joined the township force in 2003, so it’s unclear how he appeared to know intimate details of the case.
Jones and other cops believe Nucera benefited from his involvement in infamous Trooper Turnpike case in which state troopers John Hogan and James Kenna opened fire 11 times on three minority motorists along the New Jersey Turnpike in 1998.
The troopers, who were white, claimed they fired on the van because they thought the driver was attempting to run them over.
Gerrow, who at the time was head of the BCPO SIU that handled police misconduct complaints, was appointed a special prosecutor in the Trooper Turnpike case. Nucera, a forensic mechanic, performed initial inspections on the vehicles and formed an opinion that bolstered the prosecution’s theory of the case.
Gerrow claimed in a previous interview with The Trentonian that it was unlikely that Nucera, who had a “minor role” in the investigation, would have taken the stand as a witness in the case.
“He was not a critical or crucial witness, but he did help,” Gerrow said.
The troopers pleaded guilty to reduced charges in 2002 as part of deal that required them to give up their jobs but spared them from prison.
Jones and other township cops are convinced Nucera’s findings were pivotal for Gerrow’s case. And so, his office, not wanting to muddy up their own witness, didn’t move on Nucera in the excessive force case.
Gerrow said he wouldn’t have given Nucera or another cop preferential treatment. He said Wednesday he handled so many cases over the decades that he still didn’t remember Jones, and his allegations against Nucera. “I wish I did,” he said. Rocco Cipparone Jr., Nucera’s attorney, said in an interview Wednesday at the federal courthouse the BCPO determined Jones’ allegations were unfounded.
“I put my faith in the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office that they did their job,” he said. “What I understood was that the guy who Evan Jones alleged Frank had an inappropriate interaction with was interviewed and said that did not happen.
“You’re talking about people who have been holding on to whatever grudges they’ve had for years,” Cipparone added. “This not a fun time for Frank Nucera. And they’re trying to kick him when he’s down is what I make of it. I do not believe there are strength in numbers . ... All these guys are trashing, including Chief Pesce, the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office and investigators and prosecutors. In my experience in 31 years, most prosecutors and investigators are doing the job, and they’re doing it the right way. They’re not going to put their careers on the line just to help out a police officer. Basically, what they’re doing is calling the prosecutor’s office and the investigators completely unethical, if not criminal. I find it hard to believe.”
Still Jones is convinced the BCPO cut Nucera a break.
“One of the things that goes on in this county is there’s a tremendous amount of corruption, and it’s part of doing business,” Jones said. “They weren’t going to prosecute him. Are you kidding me? He’d have been gone then.”
Taylor, who retired as a sergeant in 2011 after more than two decades on the force, suggested investigators didn’t “want to believe Evan, so they didn’t.”
“Frank’s a politician. That’s how he got away with it,” he said.
Tables Turn
The focus of the BCPO investigation, Jones said, turned to him. Soon after, he was sent for a psychological exam and taken off the streets, he said.
Kiernan, who now lives in Florida and could not be reached for comment, “thought I was having some problems. I was because I was being pressured and harassed. No sh*t I was having problems.”
Jones lawyered up and stopped cooperating with the prosecutor’s office, sensing the fix was in.
“I wouldn’t talk to them anymore. I was told, ‘That makes you guilty.’ I said, ‘No that makes me look smart,’” he said.
Suffering from post traumatic stress disorder exacerbated by the alleged harassment he faced for going against Nucera, Jones went on stress leave. Even then, he says, Nucera showed up at a workers compensation hearing to petition he not get any.
Jones said he eventually reached an agreement with the department to leave with a 50 percent disability pension. He was making $60,480 at the time he officially retired. State records show the Jones’ retirement date as May 2002. He earns a $2,016 monthly pension.
“I took my medicine and walked away. I just wanted away from it,” he said. “I couldn’t have gone back there. No matter what I did, whether I did everything right, he would have done everything he could to sabotage me and drive me out. This is his mode of operation.”
Jones said he would have stayed much longer if not for Nucera.
Asked whether it turned out better for him, the cop said, “oh hell no. Financially, hell no. If I stayed to 30, which I would have if he wasn’t around, my pension would be three times what it is. Could you live on [$2,016 a month]? Could you feed three kids and put a house over their heads?”
Jones said the difference between him and Roohr is Roohr went to the feds with recordings.
“You know what, as far as I’m concerned, Nate Roohr has brass balls,” Jones said. “He risked his job, his career, his reputation. He could have ended up just like me.”