Officers present during Fall River police station beating can keep their jobs following investigation

Two Fall River police officers who were present for the beating of a suspect at the city’s police station in 2020 will keep their jobs, after an investigation released this week found insufficient evidence to prove whether they filed false reports in violation of department policy.

An earlier FBI investigation into the beating already led to prison time for one former Fall River police officer, Nicholas Hoar, who was convicted in federal court in February of striking a suspect’s head with a steel baton and filing a false report claiming the suspect fell and hit his head while resisting arrest.

Three other officers present during the incident — Jeffrey Maher, Zachary Vorce and Brendan McNerney — made statements claiming they didn’t see what happened. But Maher later recanted his report and became a whistleblower. McNerney and Vorce stuck by their initial accounts.

The latest investigation commissioned by the Fall River Police Department explores whether Vorce and McNerney made false statements when they claimed they didn’t see how the suspect, William Harvey, got injured. Both officers helped escort Harvey into a holding cell shortly before he was hospitalized with a gash on his head.

“I recall Harvey making a motion to kick Officer Hoar. At that point, I was focused on the [sic] Harvey’s foot,” Vorce wrote in his report of the incident. “I am not certain what occurred while they were in the cell due to [sic] obstructed view of the interior of the cell.”

In his own report, McNerney said Hoar pushed Harvey away in what appeared to be self-defense, causing Harvey to stumble.

“When we were in the cell gaining control of Mr. Harvey and handcuffing him,” McNerney wrote,  “we noticed he was bleeding from a cut on his head. I do not know how he received this injury.”

Maher, the whistleblower, testified at Hoar’s federal trial this winter that all three of them could clearly see Hoar using a steel baton to strike Harvey’s head, which made a loud sound like “an aluminum bat hitting a baseball,” he said. But Maher said he was the last of the four police officers to file a report about the incident, and that he felt pressured to avoid contradicting Officers McNerney and Vorce.

“It would be a very bad position for all of us,” Maher said, “and they were brand new officers — good officers — and to save their reputation and their jobs, I lied.”

The investigation, led by a consultant identified as Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting LLC, found that Maher’s statements were not credible or consistent enough to discipline McNerney or Vorce, even though they formed the basis of a successful federal prosecution.

When the investigator pressed Maher in a follow-up interview after the trial on what exactly McNerney saw, Maher allegedly responded, “I can’t say that he definitely saw it. I believe he saw it, but … I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking in the cell. I saw them out of the sides of my eyes. But why would they close their eyes?”