NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A Bronx woman claims NYPD officers planted a gun on her in retaliation after she filmed them arresting her cousin in 2019, according to a lawsuit filed last month in the borough's Supreme Court.
Anais Pagan, who was an 18-year-old high school senior at the time of the arrest, told the New York Daily News that she believes "you can never recover from a situation like this because once it’s happened, you always have that thought in the back of your mind."
"Like, what if this happens again? There’s cops outside right now," she added. "What if I go outside and they stop me?"
Pagan, who was handcuffed and charged with gun possession, said in the April 26 wrongful-arrest lawsuit that surveillance video shows the 22-year-old never had a gun, according to her attorney, Neil Wollerstein.
He noted that the .22 caliber gun police said she was holding did not have her fingerprints or her DNA.
Judges in two separate cases found NYPD Detective Richard Cleri, who claimed in court filings that he observed the weapon fall from Pagan's waistline on Feb. 8, 2019, to have offered inaccurate testimony.
Cleri's credibility has even been called into question before, according to Wollerstein.
Court documents show that in 2016, a Brooklyn judge found Cleri’s account of a car stop that resulted in an arrest for possession of marijuana and a gun as "faulty and uncorroborated." Two years earlier, a federal judge in another gun case called Cleri’s testimony about a car stop "not credible."
Wollerstein told the Daily News that Pagan's arrest was a "classic" case of planted evidence, "no doubt about it."
The suit was originally filed in June 2020, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the city attorneys' failure to meet court deadlines. In February, Judge Mitchell Danziger sanctioned the city and fined it $2,000 for "continued failure to comply with this court's directives."
Wollerstein has requested grand jury minutes in order to determine whether any of the officers involved in the arrest lied under oath. A full list of questions about the matter is included in the motion.
Pagan, who now works at Target and as a home care aide, had never been arrested until the Fulton Ave. near E. 173rd St. incident.
She told the Daily News she was arrested after she decided to film cops arresting her cousin, Joshua Freeman, for possession of a gravity knife and marijuana.
"I wanted to record, not only for my protection, for his protection as well," she said. "The police, they have bad tendency of putting their hands on people, so for our protection I wanted to record."
Cops then allegedly "got angry" and placed her in handcuffs. According to a criminal complaint, police claimed Pagan adjusted her waistband as cops approached. The gun then fell from the waistband and onto the sidewalk when an officer tried to stop her.
However, Wollerstein wrote that the video "does not depict any officer bending down to retrieve anything from the sidewalk."
Police in court papers claimed a confidential informant told them Pagan had a gun, which led to her arrest.
Due to a charge of criminal possession of a firearm, she faced a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Pagan had to appear in court 12 times before the charges were dropped after nearly a year. She graduated late because she missed so much school.
Charges were also dropped against Pagan's cousin, who sued and settled for $30,000, according to Wollerstein.
The NYPD has refused to comment on ongoing litigation and has declined to answer any questions about the incident or Cleri. New York City denied any wrongdoing in the case.
The charges against Freeman and Pagan were dropped because a civilian witness was unavailable to testify, according to a spokesperson for Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark.
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