Barrie officer convicted in beating no stranger to complaint

News and stories about instances of police misconduct and other police-related material.

Barrie officer convicted in beating no stranger to complaint

Postby Thomas » Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:08 am

Barrie officer convicted in beating no stranger to complaints

Const. Jason Nevill faced at least 20 public complaints, substantiated or not, in the past 13 years, a former appointee to the Barrie Police Services Board said in a statement.

Barrie police Const. Jason Nevill was sentenced to a year in jail last week after being found guilty of assault causing bodily harm, fabricating evidence and obstructing justice.

By: Rosie DiManno Columnist, Published on Fri Oct 25 2013

“Everybody complains about us.” That was Barrie Police Const. Jason Nevill on the witness stand earlier this year.

Everybody, it would appear, had a pretty good measure of the man. There have been at least 20 public complaints against Nevill, substantiated or not, in the past 13 years.

In 2005, Nevill was acquitted of assault against a civilian. But professional standards docked him 16 hours pay.

In 2007, he received a reprimand and was docked one hour’s pay for insubordination. He’d called his sergeant, during parade, a “f------g moron.”

At a 2009 meeting of the Barrie Police Services Board, during a discussion about complaints that could possibly lead to litigation, then-police chief Wayne Frechette described Nevill as a “danger,” speculated the 230-pound weight-lifting officer may have been using steroids, and informed the board that he’d taken away Nevill’s firearm as a disciplinary action.

Those allegations are contained in a statement that Don MacNeill, a former appointee to the board, signed in June, right after Nevill was convicted of assault causing bodily harm and fabricating evidence in the vicious beating of an innocent man at a Barrie mall in 2010.

“When I first heard that the OPP had laid charges against Nevill, I almost fell off my chair,” MacNeill told the Star this week. “I couldn’t believe this man was still on the force.”

MacNeill, it should be noted, was himself kicked off the board following conviction on a domestic assault charge — for throwing a TV remote control at his now ex-wife. But in 2008, he came to know Nevill when both were taking paralegal courses at a Barrie college. “At the time, Nevill was on suspension over an assault,” MacNeill recalls.

He thought Nevill was “a peculiar personality.” As MacNeill wrote in his statement: “For example, he would frequently ask the instructor if he could take his shirt off and attend class only in his tank top.”

MacNeill certainly recognized Nevill’s name when it came up at the board meeting. “He was a conceited guy, with his buttons undone to show off his muscle-shirt.”

When Nevill was charged, MacNeill was astonished that the cop was still out there, carrying a gun, and riding alone in a cruiser on the night he came into violent contact with Jason Stern.

Last week, Nevill was sentenced to one year for the assault on Stern — captured by a surveillance camera — and lying about it afterwards. On Tuesday, a judge rejected Nevill’s bid for bail pending his appeal.

The more significant issue, however, is that Barrie police clearly recognized they had a loose cannon on their hands long before Nevill laid a brutal pounding on Stern. This will no doubt come into play as the police department, the City of Barrie and Bayfield Mall defend themselves in the $1 million lawsuit Stern has brought against the whole bunch of them. Only the mall security company, Paragon Protection Ltd. — employer of the two mall cops who held Stern down during the beating (but were never criminally charged) — has thus far filed a statement of defence.

It’s a convoluted story, packed with duplicity.

On Nov. 20, 2010, Stern was leaving the mall around 1 a.m. after a bowling session with his girlfriend and another couple. The other male in this party of four had jumped up and broken an overhead Christmas ornament. Stern had gone back inside to retrieve the wallet he’d forgotten at the bowling alley when he was stopped by two security guards. They in turn called the cops. Stern, who’s admitted he’d had about a half-dozen beers throughout that evening but was not intoxicated — as a judge would later agree — figured he’d just apologize and offer to pay for the busted bauble.

Within 30 seconds of Nevill responding to the call-out, he had Stern on the ground and was whaling away at him, zero to ballistic in less than a minute, even with Stern handcuffed. To this day, Stern, who’d briefly lost consciousness and was later diagnosed with concussion, can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. But he does remember Nevill becoming infuriated when he, Stern, refused to give his friend’s name.

Stern was bleeding profusely yet it was about 20 minutes — after the blood had been washed from the pavement — before Nevill transported him to hospital. “He told me that I was being charged with assaulting a police officer and that I should plead guilty, that I’d just get a fine,” Stern told the Star on Wednesday, in his first media interview since the whole nightmare began three years ago.

In fact, with an assault police charge, Stern was looking at jail time. The charge against him was withdrawn only after the surveillance video surfaced in early 2011. A private investigator hired by Stern’s criminal lawyer learned of the tape’s existence but the mall would not turn it over. It was the Barrie Crown attorney who got her hands on it, immediately dropped the charge and gave the tape to OPP investigators, who ultimately charged Nevill.

“Up until the video, I was a dead duck,” says Stern, who’d had no previous run-ins with police. “Literally, I didn’t have a chance. It was me against a cop and the security guards, who all falsified their notes.”

Stern knew he was covered with bruises, knew there was a deep gash over his right eye, knew he was concussed — there are medical records — but what the heck had happened? Had he, this bespectacled slightly-built guy really hit a cop to provoke the violent arrest? “I didn’t understand how, out of the blue, I could just go crazy like that. I kept asking myself, ‘did I really do that?’ That’s just not me.”

Not until he was called in by the OPP to view the video did he finally understand.

“I was completely unprepared for it, because I had no recollection of what had actually occurred. And then I watch it, from a kind of third person point of view. It’s something, to watch yourself getting beaten to a bloody pulp, pools of your own blood on the ground. He’s punching me in the head, he’s throwing me on the ground, he’s sitting on me for an extended period of time.”

The day the charges against Stern were dropped, “I felt like a piano had been lifted off my shoulders.”

He was less relieved than fearful. “I didn’t know if they were going to charge him. I was scared. I thought I was going to be blackballed. I thought they were going to come after me. I thought the band of brothers that is the police was going to get me in some way, shape or form.”

Before the tape, his own friends had doubted that the incident could have been unprovoked. “They said, ‘you must have done something. Police don’t just act out like that for nothing’.”

But, as the tape makes clear, there was nothing to explain Nevill’s fury, though he argued at trial that Stern had been drunk and belligerent, that he was leery because Stern had kept his hands in his pockets when confronted.

“The pocket is the unknown,” Nevill testified. “There could be a weapon in there.” And: “He was resisting arrest. I was fighting for my life here, and losing.”

A tissue of lies, all of it, as Justice Lorne Chester concluded in the judge-alone trial.

Stern, a 28-year-old commodities trader by profession, has spent three years combating depression and anxiety, fearful of going out alone, in a panic whenever he crosses paths with a police officer.

“I think, that night, (Nevill) wanted to be judge, jury and executioner. Because I wouldn’t give up my friend’s name, he decided to teach me a lesson.

“It’s scary to think that this guy was a public servant, out on the street protecting us, the people.”

There is little sense of vindication, however. He simply came too close to having his life ruined by a lying, thug cop.

“It’s given me a sense of justice prevailing — but only because of the tape. Justice would have failed miserably if not for the video.

“I know that there are good cops out there. But I also know that they can take your life in their hands, crumple it up, spit it out and feel no remorse. As he has shown no remorse.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/10 ... manno.html
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Barrie officer gets year in jail and one year probation

Postby Thomas » Sat Jan 25, 2014 11:54 am

Barrie officer gets year in jail and one year probation; suspended without pay

A Barrie courtroom erupted in applause Thursday when a judge sentenced a city police officer who was captured on video laying a vicious beating on an innocent man was sent to jail for one year.

“This type of conduct will not be tolerated. Not now, not ever,” Justice Lorne Chester said in his sentencing, Thursday. “This law applies to everyone – me, the king and the common man.”

He sentenced Const. Jason Nevill to 12 months in jail for assault causing bodily harm, obstructing justice and fabricating evidence in his notes to make the innocent man appear guilty.

The victim, Jason Stern, who was 25 at the time, was returning to Barrie's Bayfield Mall to retrieve his lost wallet when two burly security guards told him to wait for police because Stern’s friend had broken a Christmas ornament earlier that night Nov. 20, 2010.

A seven-minute video shows Stern patiently waiting for the police with the two guards.

“I thought, 'What’s the worst that can happen?',” Stern said during his testimony at the trial. “I would just offer to pay for the ornament.”

But in the video the large, muscular Nevill arrives, walks up to the smaller Stern and within a few seconds attacks him. The officer throws Stern to the ground, cuffs him and continues the beating while the two guards – who were never charged or never called to testify at the trial – assist the officer by holding Stern face-down in a pool of his own blood.

The judge noted that Nevill has shown no remorse for his crime and dragged the case through a lengthy trial.

“He says he didn’t do anything wrong,” said the judge, who noted the victim was thrown around by the officer like a “rag doll” while he was handcuffed.

Stern suffered a concussion, several cuts and bruises and required stitches to his head.

Three days later, when more bruises developed, Stern was “black and blue, his body covered with goose eggs and he was barely able to walk,” said the judge.

Stern still suffers from memory loss and his concentration has also been affected.

Initially, the officer fabricated the evidence and charged Stern with assaulting a police officer.

Stern, who has never been in trouble, was terrified to learn he was facing two years in jail, but his parents hired local lawyer Mike Millar, who was able to obtain the video.

The fact that Nevill lay a beating on Stern, then tried to have him charged with a crime “adds insult to injury,” said Crown attorney Brenda Cowie. “This shakes the very foundation of the justice system. … If it were not for that video, none of us would have ever known what happened that day.”

The officer’s lawyer, David Butt, urged the judge to give less time in jail.

“Jail is a dangerous place for a police officer to be,” Butt said. "There are people there who hate police officers and those jails are overcrowded and understaffed."

To prove his point, Butt used his laptop to call up a Sun Media news story where the video was first published and referred to graphic comments made by readers.

"What a piece of human waste," one reader wrote about Nevill. "He deserves weeks of torture."

Butt insisted the video should not taint Nevill's character completely.

"This was an officer who was very good at dealing with people," said Butt, while muffled guffaws could be heard in the courtroom. "Do you judge a man by one seven-minute video captured when he is at his worst? Or do you judge him by the big picture?"

Butt also noted Nevill, who has been on paid suspension, will "almost certainly lose his job" if he goes to jail.

Butt says he will appeal the case, which means Nevill could be out of jail within a few days.

Outside court, the soft-spoken Stern, flanked by his mom, dad and family, said he is pleased with the sentence.

“It’s a victory for the people of Barrie,” Stern said. “To have somebody like that off the streets and not harassing people.”

However, Stern said he was disappointed that Barrie police had Nevill on the streets in the first place.

“You can’t have people like that squeaking through the system,” he said, noting Nevill had been the subject of public complaints in the past. “This problem could have been avoided, but it wasn’t.”

http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/2013/1 ... al-assault
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Former Barrie Police officer denied early parole

Postby Thomas » Thu Feb 20, 2014 9:04 pm

BARRIE - The victim of a brutal cop beating says it would have been “an insult” if the parole board granted the officer who assaulted him early release from jail.

The Ontario Parole Board last week denied early release to former Barrie Police officer Jason Nevill, who has now served about four months of a one-year sentence for assault causing bodily harm and fabricating evidence.

He was convicted last October after a lengthy trial of beating Jason Stern at a mall on Nov. 20, 2010.

“It would have been an insult to the people of this community if he were let out,” Stern said in an interview Wednesday. “I’m definitely happy they took the matter seriously enough ... Unfortunately it’s only a matter of time before he does get out.”

During the trial, the Crown produced a surveillance video that captured Nevill beating Stern, then 25, while he lay handcuffed and face-down in a pool of blood. The incident was triggered after his friend broke a foam Christmas bulb at a mall. Stern suffered a concussion and several cuts and bruises all over his body.

“As an on-duty police officer, you severely assaulted the victim, then lied about what had occurred,” the parole decision states. “The truth was discovered through the surveillance camera.”

The decision also noted that it could not confirm Nevill’s claims to have lined up employment as well as sessions at an anger management agency in Midland.

Stern said the parole board contacted him to ask him how he would feel if Nevill was set free.

“I told them I am concerned about my own safety as well as the safety of my family,” said Stern. “I’m afraid of vengeance.”

Stern said he looks over his shoulder everywhere he goes, and feels a rush of fear whenever he sees a police officer.

“I was a perfectly normal person before this happened,” he said. “Now I am filled with anxiety ... I feel like I am being watched.”

Stern’s mother, Brenda, said she breathed a sigh of relief when she learned Nevill will remain behind bars.

“I’m just so happy that they have taken this seriously,” she said.

Stern recalled that for months after her son was beaten “black-and-blue,” the Crown sought to send him to jail for assaulting a police officer. The family pooled its resources and hired lawyer Mike Millar who discovered the existence of the mall video.

Charges against Stern were dropped and Nevill was brought before the courts.

Nevill, who has since agreed to resign from the Barrie Police Services for an undisclosed financial settlement, now works as a cleaner in jail and is kept under special protection for his own safety.

He will be automatically paroled in June after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/02/19/ba ... rly-parole
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Ex-Barrie cop in mall beating released from jail

Postby Thomas » Sun Jun 22, 2014 9:44 am

Victim says he's scared

BARRIE - A former Barrie police officer who was sentenced to jail after he was captured on video beating an innocent man was released on parole Tuesday.

And his victim says he is “nervous” about the release.

Jason Nevill was convicted last October of assault causing bodily harm and fabricating evidence for the Nov. 20, 2010, attack on Jason Stern, 25.

During the trial, the Crown showed a mall surveillance video that captured Nevill in uniform beating Stern, who lay face-down in a pool of blood with his hands cuffed behind his back. The incident was triggered after Stern’s friend broke a foam Christmas ornament at the mall.

Stern suffered a concussion and several cuts and bruises all over his body.

Nevill resigned as a cop while in jail.

“It’s definitely an uneasy feeling,” Stern said Tuesday. “It makes me nervous — I mean, at the trial he said he had no remorse for what he did to me, so how do I know how he feels now?”

Stern said he got a courtesy call from the probation officer to inform him of Nevill’s release. He also learned that Nevill has changed his legal name to Dakota Hought.

“It’s a name I will be watching out for,” said Stern. “I told the probation officer I’m a little on edge, and a little scared.”

Nevill previously applied twice for early parole and was denied, but now he must be released by law after serving two-thirds of his one-year sentence. The remaining four months of his sentence will be served in the community under the guidance of his probation officer.

Nevill now faces a $3-million civil lawsuit for damages, along with the Barrie Police and two mall security guards who appear on the video. The guards were never called as witnesses at the trial.

The case will be back in court June 24.

Stern says he continues to get counselling for psychological trauma.

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/06/17/ex ... =hootsuite
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