It started with a fight involving an alleged stalker. Angelo Reyes showed up and broke up the fight. The episode ended with Reyes getting arrested — and a civilian complaint that Fair Haven’s top cop protected the alleged stalker because of business ties.
Angelo Reyes has filed the civilian complaint against Lt. Luiz Casanova, Fair Haven’s district manager.
Reyes, Fair Haven’s most active homegrown builder and booster, charged that Casanova abused his power and invented facts in the case, protecting a stalker who beat up his ex-girlfriend. Cops did not arrest the alleged stalker, who admitted getting in the fight before Reyes broke it up.
Asked about the complaint, Lt. Casanova said that he was doing the opposite of what Reyes has charged — that he was making sure that a prominent person in the community, Reyes, wasn’t protected.
“I think Angelo made a bad decision. He got arrested for it. He’s got to deal with it,” Casanova said. “It’s not something we’re going to overlook at the police department.”
Lexington Ave. Showdown
The episode began around 10:30 p.m. on June 9. A woman who works for Angelo Reyes at the People’s Laundromat on Lombard Street was driving with a male friend to his home on Lexington Avenue.
The male friend happens to live across the street from Angelo Reyes on Lexington. Reyes is the friend’s landlord.
On Lexington Avenue, they encountered another man — the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Hugo Huerta.
According to a subsequent police report, the woman told the cops that Huerta had been “follow[ing] her all over the place” since she broke up with him several months earlier. “He follows her to the store and sometimes, he follows her to work.”
Huerta confronted the woman and her friend on Lexington Avenue and “accused her of having an affair with him,” which she denied, according to the police report. “He would not believe them. He then started to assault her friend. She tried to intervene and she got beat up for helping her friend out,” according to the report. The officer stated in the report that he observed bruises on her left arm and “stated that she is afraid of him and is in fear of him assaulting her in the future.” The officer took “four photos of her injuries.”
The woman told the same story in an interview with the Independent and the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz Hispana. (She spoke in Spanish, translated by a La Voz staffer.)
She said that while Juerta was assaulting her, her male friend called landlord Reyes on a cell. Reyes came out of his house. She said Huerta jumped on Reyes and started to attack him.
“Angelo pinned him on the ground and told him to stop,” the woman said. Then, she said, Reyes told him to leave, and went back into house house.
At that point, she said, she calmed Huerta down, then drove him away from the neighborhood and dropped him off on Grand Avenue. And he left.
Police made no arrests that night.
They came to interview the woman the next morning, at work. The cops suggested she seek a restraining order against Huerta. She did, and obtained one.
Calling On A Contact
The next day, Huerta showed up at the Fair Haven police substation and told his side of the story to Lt. Casanova. He knew Casanova because he has done sheetrocking work for him.
Later an officer was dispatched to the substation to meet with Casanova and the Huerta. According to the officer’s report, Huerta claimed that he and his ex-girlfriend were “on friendly terms.” He told the officer that he had “met” with the ex-girlfriend and her male friend the night before. He admitted that he began arguing with the male friend, and “they started to shove each other throw a few punches,” at which point the male friend called Reyes for help.
Reyes broke up the fight; Huerta “told him to leave,” the cop quotes Huerta as saying. Huerta is then quoted as saying that “he and Mr. Reyes proceeded to get physical, during which Mr. Reyes punched him, threw him down to the ground, and caused the right side of Mr. Huerta’s face and shoulder to get scraped … Mr. Reyes then returned to his house and came back outside holding an aluminum bat in his right hand a black object in his left hand, which he thought might be a pistol, but he could not confirm what the object was for sure.” At that point Reyes told the man to leave, which he did, according to the report.
(Both Reyes and the ex-girlfriend said in interviews that Reyes did not come back out, and that he never had a bat or a gun.)
The police report states that the ex-boyfriend “removed his T‑shirt at the substation to show me the injuries he sustained during the fight. [He] had obvious swelling and redness on the right side of his face, along with scrapings on his right ear and cheek/chin area. He also sustained a large scrape on his right shoulder and lighter scrape marks on his right shoulder blade.”
Three officers proceeded to visit Angelo Reyes at his home. First they questioned him.
“When asked how Mr. Huerta ended up on the ground, he stated he wasn’t sure and that it might’ve happened when Mr. Huerta and [the ex-girlfriend’s male friend] were fighting each other. Mr. Reyes later stated that he did end up throwing Mr. Huerta to the ground when he felt he was charged at and was trying to get Mr. Huerta off of him,” the reports states.
The police then handcuffed Reyes, took him to 1 Union Ave., and charged him with breach of peace and third-degree assault.
Huerta was not charged with a crime. [A man answering the door at the ex-boyfriend’s house last Friday, identifying himself as Huerta’s cousin, said Huerta was in Chicago.]
Reyes Swings Back
The arrest came at a particularly bad time for Reyes.
In two weeks Reyes, who’s 43, has an appointment with the state’s pardons board. He is seeking a pardon for drug-dealing charges from the 1980s. After leaving prison in the 1990s, he turned his life around and became a successful renovator of homes and business owner in Fair Haven. He has been credited with reviving much of the Lombard Street area as well as the main commercial drag of Grand Avenue. He also sponsors neighborhood events for kids and helped organize a special service district there.
This case jeopardizes his pardon.
By late last week, a month after the incident, Huerta still hadn’t been arrested. Fed up, Reyes filed his civilian complaint with the department.
In it, Reyes charges that Casanova invented the story about Reyes having a gun in order to get him in trouble based on his criminal history. He asks why Huerta was never arrested, given the physical evidence of injuries suffered by the ex-girlfriend and her male friend — and why Reyes was arrested for “breaking up a fight.”
“[W]hen I asked the officers [arresting him] who their supervisor was their questions stopped. I now realized that the relationship between Hugo and Lt. Casanova was going to affect the outcome of the complaint. So I didn’t answer any more questions,” Reyes wrote.
“Hugo is or has been an employee in the recent months for Lt. Casanova. During the time of his employment Hugo has conducted numerous amounts of renovations. It made sense why Lt. Casanova would work on a personal level for Hugo, instead of a professional one. That’s why Hugo wasn’t arrested, that’s why Lt. Casanova would send three new officers who wouldn’t question command, to conduct a one-sided investigation…
“Lt. Casanova had time and the means to look and use my past history against me. Hugo and both witnesses say Hugo engaged in fighting. The officer handling this investigation totally disregarded this information.
“The following day I was at Lowes, Lt. Casanova approached me, his last words were, he’s looked up my record and no one would believe me because it’s his word against mine (in other words, I am a convicted felon and he being a lieutenant for the NHPD gives him the advantage).”
A Working Relationship
Until this incident, Reyes and Casanova had worked together as leaders of Fair Haven’s battles against crime and on behalf of immigrants targeted by crime.
Casanova said he handled this case by the book. He did see Reyes in Lowes, but never made those comments or invented information, he claimed.
“The real deal is that the guy [Hugo Huerta] doesn’t work for me. He did a job for me one time as a contractor recommended by Angelo. It was nothing.
“He comes in and files a complaint. We turn it over to an officer. The officer investigates it. The guy has visible injuries. It has nothing to do with me or the guy who worked for me.
“The officer independently investigates and finds probably cause to make an arrest.”
Casanova was asked if he was aware that the woman had accused Huerta of stalking her, or that she had a protective order against him. He was asked if he was aware that other cops had investigated the incident the night it happened and filed a report citing the woman’s injuries and the charge, by her and her male friend, that Huerta had physically attacked them.
“I didn’t see any of that,” Casanova said. “At the end of the day, even if that was happening, Angelo has no right to beat anybody up. He’s blaming me for something he consciously made a decision on doing while I was home sleeping.
“It was a clear assault,” Casanova said. “The guy came in and made a complaint. We’re not going to overlook things because it’s Angelo. We’re going to investigate every crime that comes across the desk.”
Meanwhile, the ex-girlfriend said now, “I see my house different.” Huerta used to live there with her until she threw him out. She has since changed the locks. But, she said, she’s scared he’ll crawl through the window. He used to do that, she said, when they would lock themselves out of the apartment. Now it’s her apartment alone.