Meadville taps ex-FBI agent to review police action in physical confrontation with man
Officials announced in a news release issued on the late afternoon of July 14 that they have engaged PMG investigations and George Gast, of Edinboro, to conduct a use of force review of the incident, which occurred on Baldwin Street in Meadville on the late afternoon of July 11.
The man police confronted, 33-year-old Nathan T. Koman, of Meadville, was wanted on drug charges from an incident in May and resisted arrest despite being hit with a Taser several times after an officer encountered him on Baldwin Street July 11, police charge in a criminal complaint filed against Koman on July 13.
In the video clip, one Meadville officer is seen wrestling Koman to the ground as another officer runs up and throws punches down on him.
Police charged Koman with misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia and public drunkenness in the incident and he was jailed on $250,000 bond. He was jailed on $25,000 bond on drug charges in the case from May.
The officers involved in the incident remain on duty, Meadville City Manager Maryann Menanno said July 15.
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City officials said Gast, a 40-year law enforcement veteran and an FBI certified defensive tactics and use of force instructor, will conduct his review concurrently with an internal use of force investigation initiated by Meadville Police Chief Michael Stefanucci.
The results of both investigations will be shared with Crawford County District Attorney Paula DiGiacomo for additional review, city officials wrote in the news release.
Menanno said in the release that PMG Investigations and Gast were engaged to serve as an independent third party in evaluating the July 11 incident.
"In our ongoing commitment to transparency, accountability, and public trust, we believe it is essential to ensure that any concerns surrounding the appropriate use of force are reviewed with the utmost integrity and objectivity," Menanno was quoted in the release.
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Koman remained in the Crawford County Correctional Facility July 15, and a lawyer for him was not listed on his two criminal docket sheets.
In the criminal complaint filed against Koman in the confrontation, police wrote that Koman resisted arrest while attempts were made to take him into custody in the drug case from May, and he continued to resist as police deployed a Taser on him three times. The officers also gave Koman knee strikes to the body and punches to the back, which they said did not seem to be effective as Koman continued to resist, according to information in the complaint's affidavit of probable cause.
The officers involved in the incident were not injured, Menanno said July 15. Koman was taken to the Meadville Medical Center following his arrest, but he did not have injuries that required medical attention, she said.
Contact Tim Hahn at thahn@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Meadville gets outside review of police action in filmed arrest
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In death, the late accused sex trafficker and money man Jeffrey Epstein is causing his ' closest friend,' President Donald Trump, more problems than he did before he passed away in a New York prison cell in 2019. It's ironic, or some might call it just deserts, that a conspiracy theory pushed by his supporters about Epstein's purported client list now threatens to engulf the second Trump administration. Trump, after all, built his entire political career spreading metastasizing conspiracy theories into the American body politic. Recall the Obama birth certificate slander? Of course, Trump's encouragement of paranoid fringe groups like QAnon, which, when not focused on their belief that the late John F. Kennedy Jr. is the president of the United States in exile, helped spread lies about pedophiles working out of a D.C. pizza parlor. The ignition point of this story, however, can be credited to another former Trump friend: Elon Musk. Furious over the president's deficit-swelling budget, Musk took to X and let fly with a haymaker. 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,' he wrote on the platform whose AI chatbot can't seem to stop spewing antisemitic garbage. 'That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!' Musk later deleted the tweet, but has since poured more gasoline on the fire that ensued after Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI tried to assure the country there was no Epstein client list and that it was time for the conspiracy theorists to shut up. 'Just release the files as promised,' Musk wrote in a post over the weekend. It's hard to know whom to root for in a spat between loathsome characters. The problem for Trump is that any sentient American knows that he had a special relationship with Epstein and his longtime girlfriend/pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for procuring underage girls on Epstein's behalf. Of Epstein, Trump said that 'I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.' And there's video of Epstein enjoying it alongside Trump as the two ogled young women on a Mar-a-Lago dance floor in 1992. As for Maxwell, Trump even told Axios's Jonathan Swan that her 'friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. She's now in jail. Yeah, I wish her well. I'd wish you well. I'd wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.' She was proven guilty, for the record. Trump said on Tuesday that 'I don't understand it, why they would be so interested. He's been dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don't understand what the interest and what the fascination is. I really don't.' 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'I don't know that she was specific about a list or whatever, but she needs to come forward and explain that to everybody,' Johnson said after the vote. Trump also inched closer to throwing Bondi under the bus. 'Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release,' he said Wednesday of his AG. As Trump squirms in the face of something he cannot explain away to a base that still believes him largely infallible, the Epstein story poses perhaps the first real test of his second term. On Thursday, with the story continuing to simmer, Trump called it a 'SCAM' and a 'hoax' cooked up by Democrats, and he also decried his supporters as 'weaklings' for falling prey to it. Presumably, that would include Trump's former national security adviser, former Gen. Michael Flynn — that paragon of conspiracy theorist candor — who on Saturday weighed in on social media: '@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away.'
