"Things don't look good," one officer says on the police video in the hours after the May 2017 arrest in Carteret that has led to criminal charges.
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One officer described a chaotic scene when he arrived at an arrest last year to find a bruised 16-year-old cuffed and face down in a bed of rocks with "blood all over the f-----g place."
A second described his appalled reaction on seeing the injured teen at police headquarters. Another said the incident was "indefensible."
They said they knew their now-indicted fellow officer had pummeled the teen, but believed the department would cover for Officer Joseph Reiman, according to a previously unreleased dashboard-camera video.
"Things don't look good," an officer says on the recording.
"Didn't look good at the scene," another responds.
The candid conversations between three officers from the early morning of May 31 were revealed this past week after NJ Advance Media reviewed hours of previously unreleased police dashboard and body camera videos in the arrest of a borough teen -- an encounter that has spurred criminal charges and a federal lawsuit.
Carteret Police officer Joseph Reiman appears in Judge Joseph Paone's courtroom on charges of official misconduct at Middlesex County Municipal Court in New Brunswick on Friday, Feb. 9, 2018.Andrew Miller | For NJ Advance Media
One of the police car videos, obtained through a records' request, was left on for more than three hours after the arrest and gives further insight into the incident and Reiman's reputation on the 50-person force.
"I've been doing this less time than you but I've never punched anybody in the face like [inaudible]... never," an officer says in the recording.
"That's what I told Jerome last time," another officer responds.
In a later separate conversation, as two officers are driving back to the borough after following the teen to the hospital, one asks, "If he does this as a cop, what did he do before actually when he was in war?"
"Uh, huh. I was thinking the same thing the other day," another responds.
"Holy s--t.... there was probably a wave of freakin' innocent victims," the officer says.
Reiman, 31, a former Marine who joined the force in 2015 as a disabled veteran, has been suspended with pay as the case continues. The officer is the youngest brother of Carteret's longtime mayor, Daniel Reiman.
Joseph Reiman's attorney, Charles Sciarra, said in a statement Friday, referring to the police heard in the videos, that these "officers are known malingerers who slow roll to calls like they did on this one, and are cut from the same cloth as the officer in the Florida school shooting who stayed outside the building while those kids were slaughtered."
Sciarra also called on NJ Advance Media to name the officers so the attorney could "review their pitiful arrest numbers and lack of law enforcement activity as well as their agenda."
Borough officials didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.
NJ Advance Media has not named the three officers heard in the video. None of the officers has been accused of any wrongdoing, nor are they named in the lawsuit stemming from the incident.
The officers who were recorded on the running dashcam video in two separate conversations were not there when Reiman first encountered the teen but had seen the teen after the incident at the scene, at police headquarters and in the hospital.
"They know, they know how he is and they just let him continue," an officer says on the recording. "And here you are... just letting it go... and you keep making excuses."
The official narrative to explain the events, according to the officers, started at the scene and continued at headquarters: One recalls, "When I was there, they were like, 'Well, he was in a car accident. He was in a car accident.' I'm looking at this kid's face, I'm like, "that ain't a f-----g car accident... the whole side of his face has to be away from his skull and it's like repeated... lump... lump... lump."
Officer Charles Reiman, the middle Reiman brother who was the second on scene, had repeated, "He wouldn't show his hands," the same officer recalls.
"Charlie's already, ya know, writing his thesis," he says.
Another officer can be heard later in a separate recorded conversation,"They are going to blame it on the car accident... Nothin's gonna happen. They're gonna say nothing happen... he didn't have his body camera on."
The officer already knew Reiman's body camera wasn't on and questioned whether anyone's recorded the incident.
"What do you want to bet... they're all sitting around a table right now trying to get their f-----g story straight?" one officer asks after leaving the hospital.
The officer later recalls being annoyed at the hospital after the ER doctor remarked, "Wow you guys beat the s--t out of him."
"I'm just looking at him, like, would you go away?" the officer says. "Everybody we passed ... 'Hello, we didn't do this, it was this f-----g crazy guy.'"
The teen, who was unlicensed and driving his parent's car, crashed a sedan into a suspension wire at the corner of Edwin and Bergen streets following a brief police chase.
NJ Advance Media first published his account of the arrest two days before the officer was charged.
Joseph Reiman's attorney says the teen was injured in the crash and has maintained his client's innocence, saying the officer followed his training.
"Joe Reiman makes no apology for his military service and his law enforcement efforts," Sciarra said in the statement. "Face it, if your readers needed a critical response to their own life-or-death situation, they'd want Joe Reiman who runs in and not these cowards who run away."
However, two of the officers recorded on the video say what Reiman did that night went against how they've been taught to restrain someone during an arrest. None believed his injuries were from the crash.
"This is indefensible, you look at this kid and this kid is not overpowering Joe," one says after leaving the hospital. "Joe is just punching this kid in the face and not attempting at all to get control of his arms."
"We're all trained, to hold arms," another says. "You get a grip on someone's arms, there's not a lot of strength to control what they're doing."
"You're not getting a f-----g facial injury from a motor vehicle... here... and here... and here," another officer says later in the recording.
"This is just Joe f-----g pounding this kid," an officer responds.
Last summer, the prosecutor's office released videos from two police cruisers, which they said confirmed the teen's account.
The existence of the additional recordings emerged earlier this month in an amended civil lawsuit, which brought more allegations of misconduct, and were obtained through records' requests.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the teen in the weeks after the arrest, claims multiple officers were involved in the "savage beating" and that the mayor had previously protected his brother from discipline.
Two of the body camera records, which were released by Carteret, show the officers wearing them arrive at the scene minutes after the arrest and the footage runs until a tow truck takes the sedan away.
"We're are gonna need a towel," an officer can be heard saying before picking up a bloody watch. "Just be careful there's a lot of blood around there."
Those videos, for the first time, provide a view of inside the car where there does not appear to be any blood. The videos do show that the airbags deployed and an 8-inch indent can be seen on the inside of the windshield on the driver's side, which NJ Advance Media reported in its initial interview with the teen.
"Knocked the windshield pretty good," one officer can be heard saying in a body camera recording.
"That's what happens when you don't wear a seat belt," another responds. "...I don't understand why he ran, there's nothing in the car."
Reiman's attorney has argued in court that the car was prematurely totaled by the teen's family leaving him unable to do forensics on the vehicle. He claims glass was taken out of the teen's eye.
In a February hearing, Sciarra accused the prosecutor's office of failing to maintain evidence because it didn't take steps to keep the car for the defense to inspect.
The borough has not yet provided a copy of Charles Reiman's body camera video, citing an inability to redact the video to protect the identity of the juvenile.
The attorney for the teen, Eric Pennington, said previously he could not comment beyond the complaint because a judge had marked the videos confidential in the civil case. It was unclear if Charles Reiman's recording captured any of the incident or accusations made in the lawsuit.
Officer Antonio Dominguez and special officer Kevin Horn -- the two other officers involved in the arrest, according to police documents -- did not have the body cameras on during the arrest, Carteret's law director, Robert Bergen, said.
No other officers have been accused of any wrongdoing.
NJ Advance Media previously reviewed Joseph Reiman's use-of-force records from his 23 months on the job and found the officer had accounted for more than a fifth of all the department's arrests involving force over that time.
In a Feb. 9 court appearance, the assistant prosecutor Christine D'Elia said she would not use the officer's prior records of use-of-force in her main case but still may use the information against Joseph Reiman if he takes the stand. The assistant prosecutor had previously ordered a probe of the officer's history following an NJ Advance Media investigation.
Sciarra objected, but the judge said he would give the defense time to find an expert and order the state to hand over the additional discovery if the state's motion to use the officer's history was approved.
The teen, who is not being named because he is a minor, was mailed a series of traffic summonses the week after the incident but was not charged criminally, according to his father.
Reiman has been charged with assault and multiple counts of official misconduct, including falsifying records and failing to turn on his body camera.
He also faces three other lawsuits over alleged excessive force.
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Craig McCarthy may be reached at 732-372-2078 or at CMcCarthy@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @createcraig and on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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Nicole Taylor
