Published on Wednesday, September 3

BOSTON—The Boston Police Department (BPD) sergeant charged with violating a Harvard undergraduate’s civil rights two years ago told jurors yesterday that he used reasonable force on the student in a split-second reaction to suspicious behavior.

In his first substantive public statement since the incident, Sgt. Harry A. Byrne Jr. admitted that he struck Garett D. Trombly ’03 in a Brighton station house after Trombly’s arrest in the early morning of Sept. 9, 2001. But Byrne, a 23-year BPD veteran, said that he had acted reflexively out of fear for his life when he saw Trombly reach for a black object in his pocket—which he said turned out to be a cell phone. Byrne said that at the time, his mind was filled with memories of a 1993 incident in which a close friend on the force was shot and killed by an arrestee inside a station house while he watched helplessly.

Federal prosecutors allege that Byrne beat Trombly without provocation, breaking his jaw, and later instructed several BPD officers to lie to investigators looking into the incident.

After a series of altercations with Byrne near Boston College in the fall of 2001, Trombly—then a junior economics concentrator—was arrested for a number of charges including assault and battery on a police officer. Byrne said again yesterday that Trombly spit on his uniform and swatted at his hand when he came to break up a noisy party on Commonwealth Avenue for the second night in a row.

All charges against Trombly were eventually dropped, and Byrne soon became the focus of federal and internal BPD investigations. Trombly and several other witnesses testified last week that Byrne punched him in the face with closed fists, held him by the throat with one hand while striking him with the other and threw him across the room into a bench. They said that the sergeant directed a storm of obscenities and insults at Trombly during and before the alleged beating.

Byrne testified yesterday that after seeing Trombly make a sudden move, he hit the student with the heel of his hand, roughly pinned him against a wall-mounted mirror in the station house guard room and eventually slid him down on to a bench. He denied any further violence.

According to Byrne, he had reacted in a frantic split-second when Trombly—in the process of being unhandcuffed—used a free hand to grab for something in his deep pocket. Byrne said that at the time, he thought the student could have been pulling a knife or gun.

“He was a danger to himself and others,” Byrne testified.

In an emotional display yesterday morning, the sergeant also testified that in the chaotic instant before he realized what Trombly was grasping for, he had been reminded of a tragic episode from more than eight years earlier.

Pausing to compose himself more than once, his voice frequently cracking, Byrne described the death of Thomas F. Rose, a BPD officer fatally shot in a station house by a prisoner being uncuffed at the booking desk. Byrne said that he had stood just feet away—prevented from intervening by a stuck door—as his classmate and friend was shot three times with his own weapon. He testified that as Trombly reached for his pocket, memories of that night flooded back.

“I was scared stiff,” he told jurors, using a phrase repeated several times during his testimony. “I was scared for my life at that very moment.”

Within seconds, Byrne said, he realized that Trombly had only been reaching for a cell phone.

Trombly and others have testified that the phone was in fact confiscated by police earlier, at the time of the arrest, and that it sat on a guard room table during the incident. They have said that after beating Trombly, Byrne then picked up the phone and hurled it at a wall, seized by rage.

Byrne said yesterday that he had taken the phone from Trombly for the first time in the guard room, and said that he had flung it away out of distaste at having become so worked up “all over a stupid cell phone.”

Byrne said Trombly then asked him, “Is this where you beat me up now?”