Says cops mistreated him
Friday, July 18, 2008
By MICHAELANGELO CONTE
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

A Jersey City man says cops trained guns on him and roughed him up Tuesday, apparently mistaking him for another man they had mistakenly released from custody and were trying to chase down.

"They have no right to treat someone like that," said Junel Huddleston of the incident at his Salem Lafayette Court apartment.

"If they said, 'We apologize, we were following someone,' I would be OK about it. I think they (were thinking), 'We don't need to apologize to this guy. Everyone around here is scum.'"

Huddleston said the front door to his apartment was open around 2 p.m. when a man walked into his apartment and said, "The cops are chasing me," to which Huddleston replied, "You got to get out of here."

The man left through a back door, Huddleston said, adding the door was left open to clear the air of the smell of glue workers had used to lay tiles. Moments later, Huddleston said, he was standing near his 19-year-old daughter, Taheera Mathis, when three plainclothes officers ran into his apartment and trained their guns on him.

"I said the guy just ran through my back door and they said, 'Put your hands up and get the f- over here,'" Huddleston said. "I put the phone down and started walking over and he (one of the officers) grabbed me by the shirt and said, 'Now I'm going to put your ass in the (tile) glue.'"

While one officer watched Huddleston who was spread-eagled in the living room, the two other cops went out the back, he said.

"I have nothing to do with this, I live here," Huddleston told the officer holding him. "He said, 'Well you're not in handcuffs are you?'"

That's when the officer holding him got a message on his radio and ran out the front door without a word. The officers who went out the back met him in a jeep in the street and they drove off, Huddleston said.

But the parade of strangers didn't end there.

As soon as the cops left, the guy they were chasing walked in through the back door and asked, "Did they leave?"

Huddleston, a laid off shipping and receiving clerk, said he chased the man out of his apartment.

A city spokesman said police followed procedure.

"Police acted appropriately in pursuing this person, who entered someone's home without invitation, in the act of committing another crime," said city spokesman Stan H. Eason said. "They assessed the residents to insure that the subject was not amongst them to make good his escape or to cause them possible harm."

Narcotics cops caught one of the two persons they were chasing, Eason said.

?2008 Jersey Journal