Jason Serrano and his ex-girlfriend were driving down Broad Avenue on Staten Island to get some Puerto Rican food when they got stopped by two NYPD officers for a broken taillight. Standing outside the passenger side window, one of the officers, Kyle Erickson, said he smelled marijuana. “You got ashes all over you, it smells like weed,” he said with his body camera rolling.
Police ordered Serrano out of the car. After a brief argument over whether a search was necessary, Erickson and his partner Elmer Pastran pushed Serrano to the ground and cuffed him. Serrano, who was recovering from an abdominal wound, lay hurt on the sidewalk. As police waited for an ambulance, Officer Erickson’s body camera catches him mumbling, “Yeah we gotta find something.”
Serrano says he does not remember much about Erickson’s car searches beyond being in pain on the ground barely able to move. When he woke up in the hospital, he learned he had been charged with resisting arrest and for weed found in the car and a bag of crack allegedly in his jacket.
Serrano insists he did not have any contraband on him. But at the time, in the spring of 2018, he was desperate to avoid being sent to Rikers Island, given his already debilitated state. So when prosecutors offered him a plea deal, dropping the drug charges, Serrano says he jumped at it.
It was not until roughly a year later, long after he had taken that plea deal, that Staten Island prosecutors finally disclosed body camera footage of his arrest to his defense team. The footage appears to show Officer Erickson planting marijuana in the cupholder Serrano’s car, after twice telling his partner that he did not see anything inside. The body camera video did not show the officers finding a bag of crack in his jacket.
“If I had known any of this, I would have never taken that,” Serrano said, referring to the plea deal.
Now, Serrano is asking the courts to vacate his conviction. But in two recent filings, the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office has staunchly opposed his efforts. The DA’s office, which cleared Officer Erickson of any criminal conduct, argues that the body camera footage could be interpreted in different ways, and that this ambiguity bars Serrano from getting his record expunged.
Marion Elizabeth Campbell, one of Serrano’s attorneys at the Legal Aid Society, said she was surprised by their opposition. “I don’t know what could be a clearer miscarriage of justice,” she said. “Everyone can see that marijuana was planted on this person. Can we at least vacate this conviction?”
Moreover, Serrano’s video wasn’t the only other warning sign prosecutors had.
In 2018, the New York Times published another video of another car stop in which Officer Erickson appears to plant drugs on a young Black man.
And, in two different incidents the same year, NYPD internal investigators found that Officer Erickson had invoice discrepancies related to drug seizures, according to Staten Island DA records obtained by Gothamist/WNYC through the Freedom of Information Law. Additionally, the records show that a Staten Island sergeant, who approved Officer Erickson’s property clerk invoice that day, also had his own drug invoice discrepancy that was substantiated in May of 2018.
The DA’s office knew about these findings. But Serrano and his attorneys did not until Gothamist/WNYC informed them about this history.
For Serrano, the invoice discrepancies validate his suspicions that the officers were cruising around with drugs on them. At one point during the body camera footage, Officer Erickson gets back into his patrol car and the video shows what the Legal Aid Society contends are additional chunks of weed on the vehicle’s floorboard.
“Where you getting these drugs from,” Serrano asks rhetorically. “You guys are riding around with drugs in your vehicle planting them on people and getting away with it,” Serrano said, answering his own question.
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The NYPD declined to provide more information on the nature of Officer Erickson’s drug paperwork findings. In both cases, he got one of the department’s lightest penalties, command discipline, which can mean losing ten vacation days at most.
The police department and the DA’s office say the body camera videos show no criminal activity. Officer Erickson and his partner are still fully-duty NYPD officers. The NYPD and the Police Benevolent Association did not respond to requests to make them available for interviews.
Serrano’s team has filed a supplemental motion with the court. In it, they argue that Erickson’s disciplinary history should have been turned over to the defense, a failure which they say amounts to prosecutorial misconduct. The invoice discrepancy findings against Serrano, the motion says, are “further evidence of Mr. Serrano’s innocence.”
The Staten Island DA declined to discuss the pending litigation.
“I still have this on my record,” Serrano said. “There’s nobody correcting nothing. Everybody’s turning a blind eye. You have the head DA of Staten Island saying there’s no wrongdoing.”
George Joseph reports for the Race & Justice Unit at Gothamist/WNYC.
