Exactly a year ago, as a police officer straddled Aidan Turner’s prone body on the grass outside the University of New Hampshire’s Thompson Hall, the college junior contorted his head upward and asked why he was being arrested.

“For assaulting a police officer,” UNH police Captain Frank Weeks said. “You assaulted my chief.”

Turner was incredulous.

“I didn’t touch your chief,” he repeated, adding an expletive the final time.

“Yeah, you did,” Weeks responded as he and another officer handcuffed Turner with his face pressed into the grass. Weeks, the prosecutor for the department, walked him to an awaiting van, ignoring Turner’s plea to “get your chief out here” to identify him.

Police transported Turner to the Strafford County Jail, where he joined 11 others who had been arrested during a pro-Palestine protest that had quickly devolved into a police standoff.

Over the ensuing hours, as jail officials released most of the other protesters one by one, charging them with disorderly conduct and trespassing, it dawned on Turner that he would be spending the night locked up. Correctional officers strip-searched Turner and placed him in a cell.

It was “probably the worst experience of my entire life,” Turner recalled months later.

The next morning, Turner and the only other protester who had yet to be released, a graduate student named Sebastian Rowan, were arraigned on charges that they had assaulted police officers.

In an affidavit and sworn statements, officers initially accused both students of grabbing Paul Dean, the police chief at the time, who was in plain clothes when he confronted protesters. Prosecutors also charged Rowan with striking two other officers in the head with a sign.

Within days, the prosecutor in the case dropped the police chief assault charge against Rowan without explanation, but all the other charges remained active for several months, until both students reached agreements that involved doing community service.

Despite the deals, both Turner and Rowan have maintained that they didn’t assault officers that night.

In January, a working group of faculty, administrators, and other community members that had been convened by new university president Elizabeth Chilton found that “students’ freedom of speech rights were likely violated” as a result of the police response on May 1. The group called for the Durham Police Department, which has legal jurisdiction over the university police department, to launch an independent investigation.

Three weeks later, Chilton stepped in to reject those calls, writing that “there is no basis for claims that our officers submitted false information to the county attorney or the courts.”

An investigation by the Concord Monitor, which relied on over an hour of police body-worn camera and social media footage of the police response to the protest obtained via right-to-know requests, as well as interviews and court documents, found that multiple statements officers made in police reports, an affidavit, and criminal complaints were likely inaccurate.

Neither the university nor the Strafford County Attorney’s Office, which played a role in prosecuting both students’ cases, possessed any evidence that either Turner or Rowan made contact with Chief Dean, according to their responses to public records requests. The only video that either entity provided of the interaction between Dean and students, which was filmed by a bystander, showed other students making contact with the police chief as he attempted to wrestle away the flap of a tent from a group of protesters, but Turner and Rowan appeared only in the background.

Other body-worn camera footage obtained showed that Rowan engaged in a tug-of-war style confrontation with officers over a sign he and other protesters were holding, but the characterization that he “struck” two officers in the head with a sign, as officers attested, also appeared inaccurate. Because of the angles of the body-worn camera and bystander videos provided of his arrest, it is difficult to definitively determine exactly what occurred, but it is possible the sign Rowan was holding inadvertently made contact in some way with the officers as they advanced to arrest him.

Other protesters did engage in purposeful violence with police officers that evening, including at least one person who threw objects at them. One officer had a noticeable cut on his arm, the footage provided showed.

Those people, however, were not charged with assault.

The documents on which the police statements were made in Turner’s and Rowan’s cases were signed by Weeks, who arrested Turner, and by Officer Cameron Jordan. The forms state that “making a false statement on this complaint may result in criminal prosecution.”

A university spokesperson neither disputed nor confirmed the Monitor’s findings and declined to answer a detailed list of questions.

“No formal legal complaints have been filed, the individuals have been afforded due process, and all reached voluntary agreements,” the spokesperson, Tania deLuzuriaga, wrote in a statement. “This is a legal matter and if any individual disputes any aspect of the record, they have had ample opportunity to bring those concerns to their lawyers and the court.”

Dean left the university in January to become the director of citizen services in Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s administration and Weeks left the university within the past several months to become a magistrate in the state court system, according to the New Hampshire court system. Neither responded to requests for comment.

‘I didn’t touch your chief’

As pro-Palestine protests swept college campuses across the country last spring, New Hampshire’s schools initially remained quiet. That all changed on May Day, when dueling protests broke out simultaneously in opposite corners of the state.

Hours after former Gov. Chris Sununu publicly stated he would have zero tolerance for the student protests, labeling them as anti-Semitic, state police in riot gear appeared on the campuses of UNH and Dartmouth College. By the end of the night, more than 100 people across the two schools were under arrest.

Amid pages of crime logs that showed trespassing and disorderly conduct charges, the assault charges against Turner – a 21-year-old program and event management major from Connecticut – and Rowan – a 29-year-old father pursuing a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering – stood out.

Both students had engaged in pro-Palestine advocacy for months prior to the protest, including calling for a ceasefire at a Durham Town Council meeting that February. The afternoon of May 1, they joined dozens of others in the heart of UNH’s campus for the latest in a string of demonstrations organized that semester by the Palestine Solidarity Coalition and other student groups. While previous demonstrations had proceeded uneventfully, some protesters had brought tents to this one, intent on joining other university students across the country in establishing an encampment on New Hampshire’s flagship campus.

At around 6:30 p.m., as some protesters began to unfurl those tents, Chief Dean confronted them and a brief shoving match between him and them ensued, the lone footage provided of this interaction in response to the Monitor’s records requests showed. In the 55-second video shot by a bystander, Turner is visible – and, at times, vocal – but he does not come close to engaging physically with Dean. Rowan is only visible on the periphery of the footage for about one second.

Dean was not wearing “a functional body-worn camera,” according to a university system lawyer. If he had been dressed in uniform and wearing an operational camera, he would have been required to have activated it during this interaction, according to the department’s body-worn camera policy.

None of the uniformed officers activated their cameras during this scuffle either, according to the footage provided.

About an hour later, after protesters had ignored several orders informing them that the permit for the protest had been revoked, state and university police moved in and officers appeared to turn on their body-worn cameras for the first time.

At 7:37 p.m., an officer asked Dean: “Which one, chief?” Dean responded “tan coat with the red,” identifying Turner, and officers immediately began to yell that description in unison.

Forty seconds later, as Turner ran over to provide the phone number for a lawyer to another student who was being arrested, Weeks pointed at him and said, “This guy right here.” As Turner raised his hands and asked, “What did I do?”, Weeks grabbed the neck of Turner’s red sweatshirt and threw him to the ground, twisting his arm behind his back to force his head down.

As Weeks escorted the handcuffed Turner to a police vehicle, Turner asked again, “Is your chief here? Can he come and ID me? Because I didn’t touch him, man.”

“That’s fine, we’ll sort it out, but it’s still criminal trespassing for not dispersing,” Weeks responded.

Neither the videos reviewed nor the interviews conducted definitively clarified why Dean singled out Turner, given that other students did in fact make contact with him an hour prior who were not arrested. One possibility is that Turner was simply the most recognizable person in the vicinity of that altercation. While the other protesters who physically confronted Dean wore masks and dark clothes, Turner’s face was visible and he sported a red sweatshirt and tan coat.

The amount of force Weeks used to arrest Turner, who was not resisting, also raises questions about whether the department followed its use of force policy, which requires that officers use “the least amount of force necessary to effect an arrest.” The UNH spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether Weeks had submitted a use-of-force report, which would have been required according to the policy.

Turner struggled in the immediate aftermath of his arrest but as he prepares to graduate from UNH later this month, he said he is doing well now.

“I think it is something that I’ve had to move on from,” he said in an interview this spring. “Essentially, what’s done has been done.”

Struck with a pole?

At nearly the same time Weeks arrested Turner, Sgt. Callum Cochran joined a trio of state police troopers in riot gear attempting to push a group of protesters back who were holding a banner that read, in part, “34,000+ MURDERED.”

“Get back!” Cochran ordered, as he pushed.

Rowan, dressed in a red sweatshirt and orange mask, refused and for a moment he and Cochran tugged back and forth at the cloth banner. Then the officers disengaged, retreating a few yards away.

Fifty-three seconds later, Dean, who was observing the interaction, directed Cochran and two other officers to arrest Rowan.

In the criminal complaints, officers allege it was during this interaction that Rowan “struck” two of them in the head with the sign he was holding. In his initial police report, Cochran wrote that Officer Lindsey Richardson “moved toward the male who then began to push the flag into her. I then went hands on with the male who struck me in the face with the pole with the banner.”

Later, Cochran submitted another report to “provide clarity,” which stated he had been hit by one of Rowan’s arms, rather than the banner. The arm “struck me in the face causing my head to jerk back after the impact,” he alleged.

The entire interaction took about six seconds and it is difficult to discern exactly what happened, even when the footage is slowed down. It appeared, though, that the banner swung up vertically as Richardson approached, and she ran into it, pushing it down, before she ran off in pursuit of another protester. It did not appear Cochran was ever hit by the banner as he took Rowan to the ground.

“I was holding the banner and another person was also holding onto the banner,” Rowan said. “And what happened was that as they approached us, the other person holding the banner turned and ran. And I think what caused the sign to go up was the other person as they turned to run, they might have flown their end up a little bit.

“They characterized it in their police report as it being basically swung at them as if it was some kind of weapon and the case is that there’s a long, wide banner made of PVC pipe that just kind of moves up and down as you hold it. It’s not the most steady thing and they put their hands on the PVC parts of it,” he said.

Rowan’s account appears consistent with the body-worn camera and bystander footage reviewed.

Last October, he admitted in a diversion agreement to resisting arrest by “us[ing] a sign to obstruct Officer Lindsey Richardson…as Officer Richardson was attempting to detain another person.”

Rowan welcomed a second daughter two months ago and is preparing to finish his Ph.D. this year. He remains involved in pro-Palestine activism but he said his arrest, and the terms of his agreement, have altered what he feels comfortable doing.

“There are fewer risks that I’m willing to take because I can’t go to jail or prison for two months with two kids,” he said. “But I’m not willing to completely just stay home and not go anywhere. There’s a level of risk you have to live with, especially when so many people are international students being whisked away to secret prisons wherever for speaking up.”

‘I’m disappointed’

As New Hampshire’s public university system faces a potentially crippling loss of state funding and as higher education institutions across the country weather attacks from the Trump administration, many at UNH have moved on from what happened a year ago.

Dean and Weeks have moved on, as well, to posts in the Ayotte administration and the state court system, respectively. James Dean, the president of UNH until last summer (who bears no relation to the police chief), and Sununu are also no longer in their leadership roles.

When Chilton assumed the UNH presidency last July, she pledged to do what she could to “understand what happened [on May 1] and learn from it so we can apply it in the future.” On Tuesday, she released her first public statement on that work since declining to pursue an investigation in February.

In a message to the campus community, Chilton wrote that the police department had conducted a review of its training programs, operational procedures, and related agreements, though she did not say if any changes had been made. She said the university had also “proposed updates” to its agreement with the Durham Police Department.

The lack of an investigation continues to bother Albert “Buzz” Scherr, a professor at UNH’s law school and a member of the working group.

“I’m disappointed,” he said in an interview this week. “It remains to be seen if they’re going to do anything.”

 

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.