It started off with a police department employee being accused of stealing, who was then found innocent. From there it went to accusations of boorish behavior in the police department and a fired police chief. Now the witness in the original larceny case, who’s secret video tape of the alleged thief was key evidence in the case, is in the news for shoplifting in a supermarket by putting banana stickers on meat packages. Damned if I know what this is ultimately all about, but if it was the work of a script writer they’d get fired for turning in a garbled, confusing, mess of a story. I guess truth is really stranger than fiction.
Most curious detail in this latest installment is that the accused in the shoplifting case worked as both a billing clerk in the police department and a senior library assistant for the city. Yet in his court appearance, he needed a translator when testifying on the stand. You definitely can’t make stuff like this up.
BTW – Kudos to the Tab’s Trevor Jones for managing to be able to report clearly on this clearly confusing story.
Is this Framingham store for the banana swap in the same neighborhood as the Framingham egging? Does the NPD have a Stop & Shop rewards card? Was the library role available because the last guy is on charges for viewing child porn? Was the bookkeeper role and the secretary role filled by others in a jam? And who dun it?
Nguyen clearly wasn’t a credible witness: “The funds she was accused of stealing came from an envelope Nguyen was responsible for in his duties as a clerk and on the day the money went missing.” He also secretly followed and taped her, and was generally scuzzy.
It’s impressive that the jury took only 1/2 hour to come to a verdict – that gives you a sense of how flimsy the case was, an how little credence the jury gave to the main witness.