Kissimmee cop pleads guilty in excessive force case that ignited scandal

Yahoo

25-04-2025

The Kissimmee police officer whose brutal beating of a man two years ago sparked a scandal in his department pleaded guilty Friday to felony battery, witness tampering and official misconduct.
Officer Andrew Baseggio now faces up to two years behind bars and must surrender his law enforcement certification, according to the plea agreement read in Osceola County court.
The beating, the false report he wrote about the incident and the 'culture of cover-up' grand jurors said led his superiors to hide his actions and give him only an eight-hour suspension eventually led to the resignation of the then-chief of the Kissimmee Police Department.
Baseggio, hired as a patrol officer at KPD in 2007, was accompanied in the courtroom by his attorney Jay Rooth as Judge Keith Carsten read out his guilty plea. They hustled out of the courthouse once the hearing concluded and did not comment to reporters.
In exchange for his plea, he can be sentenced to far less time in prison than the 40 years he initially faced. He will not be sentenced for another two months pending a court investigation. As part of his plea, two other charges he faced — solicitation of perjury and misdemeanor battery — will be dropped.
The plea also requires that he testify 'regarding any criminal activity as requested by the state,' though it is not clear for what investigation prosecutors might want his testimony. Representatives of Kissimmee Police Department and the Orange-Osceola State Attorney's Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The case began with an April 2023 call about a disturbance at a home on Brack Street. Body-worn camera video showed Baseggio illegally entered without a warrant and then brutally beat 44-year-old Sean Kastner by kneeing him in the face and stunning him with a Taser seven times. He was then taken to a hospital with lacerations on his face and a nasal bone fracture.
Baseggio later wrote an incident report that did not accurately describe what happened and then, following an internal investigation, was given an eight-hour suspension for the beating.
The incident went unaddressed until prosecutors learned what happened from a TV news report. They then took the case before the grand jury, which returned an indictment against Baseggio.
The grand jury's 34-page report questioned the credibility of 11 officers at KPD along with its top brass, including Chief Betty Holland. She resigned days ahead of the report's public release.
The report accused Holland of not being truthful with prosecutors investigating the beating and found she had blocked attempts at a criminal investigation into Baseggio's actions.
Officers who conducted the internal investigation sought to downplay the incident by falsely accusing Kastner of kicking at Baseggio, an effort to call the beating 'objectively reasonable,' the grand jury found.
Holland had also kept Baseggio informed about the progress of outside investigations, which the report said allowed him to seek to influence the testimony of fellow officers.
Then-State Attorney Andrew Bain presented the grand jury's report in October, telling reporters on the steps of the Osceola County Courthouse that the investigation into the officer 'was compromised from the beginning.'
'So we went back and re-interviewed a lot of those witnesses who were inside of that investigation, and it turned out that many of the things they said were falsified,' he said at the time.
Prosecutors also determined KPD ran afoul of Florida law by not reporting to state authorities 15 excessive force cases involving other officers or Baseggio, a lapse stretching back a decade. The reporting of those cases was later rectified but yielded no charges against the accused officers.
After Holland's resignation, city officials quickly replaced her with Orange County Sheriff's Office Maj. Robert Anzueto, who served as interim chief while OCSO conducted its own investigation into the Kissimmee department. Anzueto recused himself from that probe but moved to reform agency policies regarding internal investigations and other matters highlighted by the grand jury.
Where the Sheriff's Office investigation stands is unclear.
On April 1, Charles Broadway, the former Clermont police chief, was sworn in as Holland's permanent replacement and tasked with rebuilding the department's reputation.