BOSTON—Testimony in the trial of a Boston Police Department (BPD) sergeant charged with violating the civil rights of a former Harvard student got underway yesterday, nearly two years after the then-undergraduate claimed the officer beat him at a Brighton station house.
Federal prosecutors alleged in U.S. District Court that BPD Sgt. Harry A. Byrne Jr. used excessive force on Garett D. Trombly ’03 while the student was under arrest shortly after midnight on Sept. 9, 2001, and that Byrne later tried to convince fellow officers to lie about the incident.
Attorneys for Byrne countered that the force the defendant used was reasonable and justified by suspicious behavior on Trombly’s part.
Some memories had faded, but Trombly described the alleged beating by Byrne vividly yesterday, testifying that the officer 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 unprovoked across the room into a bench. Trombly said Byrne broke his jaw, resulting in its being wired shut for six weeks.
Trombly was under arrest at the time, following an altercation with Byrne on Commonwealth Ave. near Boston College.
Byrne accused Trombly of spitting on his uniform while he was patrolling outside the apartment of one of Trombly’s friends, an accusation Trombly denied.
At the time, Trombly was charged with assault and battery on an officer, resisting arrest and public consumption of alcohol. All charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
Trombly’s complaint about Byrne’s conduct sparked investigations by BPD’s Internal Affairs Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the latter of which culminated in Byrne’s January 2002 indictment by a federal grand jury on counts of deprivation of constitutional rights and witness tampering.
In his opening statement yesterday, Assistant U.S. Attorney S. Theodore Merritt ’74 sought to paint Byrne as a “bully with a badge,” arguing that the officer had lost his temper several times with Trombly and friends that weekend.
The testimony of the two witnesses Merritt called at the four-hour session, Trombly and his friend Maureen Leahy, bolstered this claim.
Leahy, now a BC senior, testified that Byrne had harassed her while arresting several friends the night before Trombly’s alleged beating. She said that Byrne verbally accosted her when he encountered her again the next night while on his underage drinking detail, and that Trombly’s only involvement before his arrest was to console her.
Trombly testified that after being taken to the station house, he was unhandcuffed and brought by Byrne to an empty room where he was beaten.
But defense attorneys argued that Byrne’s act was justified. In his opening statement, attorney Frank A. Libby Jr. said that as Trombly was being uncuffed in the station house he reached into his pocket for a shiny black object.
In the heat of the moment—“adrenaline racing, heart pounding”—Byrne reacted to restrain Trombly by pinning him to the wall, Libby said.
According to Libby, the object was later revealed to be a cell phone. But Trombly testified yesterday that his cell phone had been confiscated when he was arrested.
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