‘Egregious’: Judge Scolds Pennsylvania Cop Who Locked Up Black Teen for Nearly a Month and Hid Evidence That Proved His Innocence
A teen boy and his mother filed a federal lawsuit against Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and its police department, alleging false arrest and imprisonment after the boy was misidentified in a surveillance video and jailed for nearly a month on gun charges. The complaint filed by Mekhi Johnson and his mother, Amber Garrity, on July 31 (and obtained by Atlanta Black Star) claims Williamsport Police Bureau Agent Benjamin Hitesman ignored evidence proving Johnson’s innocence and failed to inform prosecutors, willful omissions that a county judge later said “cast a dark cloud” over local police and all law enforcement. After shots were fired near a park on the south side of town on July 22, 2024, police investigators obtained surveillance footage from four locations, which showed two masked people wearing jeans and hooded sweatshirts — one dark, one cream-colored — leaving a playground and walking toward a church. Moments later, a single gunshot was heard, and one video showed the two masked figures fleeing from the church parking lot. Mekhi Johnson (center) and his mother Amber Garrity (left) are suing Williamsport Police Officer Benjamin Hitesman (right) after he allegedly suppressed evidence clearing Johnson of involvement in a shooting incident in July 2024. (Photos: Amber Garrity Facebook Profile, Williamsport Police Bureau) In one four-second segment, the person wearing the cream-colored sweatshirt is seen running with what appears to be an object concealed in the front pocket of their sweatshirt, their face mostly hidden by the hood and mask, with just the bridge of their nose and hairline visible, the complaint says. Based solely on that snippet of video, the lawsuit says Agent Hitesman wrongfully identified the masked person as then-17-year-old Mekhi Johnson, who lived with his mother nearby. Hitesman wrote and obtained a sealed search warrant for the Garrity residence based on that video, saying he recognized the teen and his dreadlocks. ‘Do Not Tell Me I Just Ran Her Over’: Virginia Cop Hits Woman Who Was Already Struck In Hit-and-Run and Waiting for Help, Video Shows The next day, Hitesman and other officers broke through the front door, allegedly causing structural damage, and took Johnson into custody. Police found a .380 caliber firearm with an obliterated serial number inside a pillowcase during the search, but did not find any of the clothing observed in the surveillance footage. A shell casing of the same caliber had been found in a street behind the church, the complaint says. Johnson was taken to police headquarters, then placed in a juvenile detention facility. On July 25, 2024, he was charged with aggravated assault, possession of a firearm by a minor, and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. No one was hurt during the incident, but children were present in the area when the shooting took place, police told NorthCentralPA.com. The next day, at a probable cause hearing before Lycoming County Common Pleas Judge Ryan C. Gardner, Williamsport Police Agent Christopher Salisbury testified that he and Hitesman had identified Johnson as the person in the cream-colored sweatshirt, and that he seemed to have a firearm in his pocket. Juvenile Probation Officer Nathan Hill then testified that he was familiar with the teen, having previously supervised him for 11 months on juvenile probation following a school fight. But by then, Hitesman, Hill and several police and juvenile probation officers were well aware that the person in the video wearing the light sweatshirt was actually another teen under their supervision, identified as J.B. In emails and texts sent on July 24 and July 25, 2024, just after Johnson’s arrest, juvenile probation officers who had viewed the surveillance videos, including Kaitlin Lunger, Marquis Delgado and Hill, informed Hitesman that the person he had identified as Mekhi Johnson was in fact J.B., another juvenile well known to them. The probation officers told Hitesman on July 25 that they had visited J.B.’s home and found him wearing the distinctive white acid-washed jeans seen in the video, and that they had also found the cream-colored hoodie in his home. Lunger later testified that she had texted Hitesman photos of the recovered clothing and told him he should focus his investigation on J.B.. Hitesman responded only with an exclamation mark, she said. Over the next few weeks, Hitesman took no further action to investigate J.B., while sitting on the knowledge that Johnson was wrongly incarcerated, the lawsuit says. That included another hearing on Aug. 5, 2024 when he witnessed Johnson’s lawyer ask the judge to continue the case due to not having received and reviewed all of the discovery evidence from prosecutors. And Hitesman was still not moved to correct the record for prosecutors or defense counsel on Aug. 18, when Agent Nikita Bonnell notified him that she had enough evidence to get a search warrant for J.B.’s house for the shooting incident. “That will hurt my case,” Hitesman responded, according to testimony by Bonnell, who said she then went straight to Williamsport Police Captain Joshua Bell and Assistant District Attorney Martin Wade to fill them in. On Aug. 21, 2024, Wade and Johnson’s attorney, Matthew Diemer, who had now reviewed the discovery evidence that cleared his client, went to Judge Gardner for a brief conference, during which Gardner ordered Johnson to be immediately released from juvenile detention and returned to his mother’s home with a GPS monitor. The following day, Gardner presided over a hearing during which Hitesman, Hill, and Lunger testified. Hitesman said that he had identified Johnson based on what he believed were visible locs in the four-second video clip. He admitted that he had later disregarded the information provided by probation and police officers, indicating that he had arrested the wrong person. He also stated that he had never informed the district attorney or defense counsel of this information or completed any supplemental report documenting the evidence that identified J.B. as the likely suspect. Even after J.B.’s home was searched and the cream-colored sweatshirt was found, J.B. was never taken into custody, he acknowledged. Hill and Lunger testified that they found Hitesman’s failure to act on the evidence clearing Johnson they had presented to him as “odd.” Judge Gardner had stronger words for Hitesman. After ordering that the aggravated assault charges against Johnson be dismissed, he called Hitesman’s decision to withhold evidence “egregious.” “Any judge would want to know and should have known that Hiteman’s identification of the juvenile was speculative at best and absolutely wrong at worst,” Gardner said. He also noted that, after viewing the surveillance video, the teen’s hair, which Hitesman said was one of the identifying factors, cannot be seen underneath the hood of the sweatshirt, reported NorthCentralPA.com. As a result, the gun found during the initial search of Johnson’s house could not be used as evidence in court, Gardner ruled, calling it “the fruit of the poisonous tree.” The following day, the district attorney’s office withdrew all remaining charges against Johnson, who spent 29 days in detention, including his 18th birthday. In his scathing opinion dated Sept. 24, 2024, Gardner wrote that it was “indisputable that Hiteman failed to disclose to either the Commonwealth or defense counsel that he obtained independently corroborated information that he misidentified ” after he drafted and executed the search warrant and before both of his subsequent court hearings. “The ripple effect of Hitesman not disclosing this information is that a very dark cloud may be cast, not only over the professionalism of other members of the Williamsport Bureau of Police, it also compromises the very definition of what should underscore every criminal case that is presented before the court, justice,” Gardner said. Hiteman’s omissions “will likely result in his credibility forever being called into question,” the judge opined. After conducting an internal investigation, the Williamsport Police Bureau demoted Hitesman from agent (investigator) to uniformed officer, NorthCentralPA reported. The federal lawsuit includes 11 counts against Williamsport Police Bureau, Hitesman, Hill, the City of Williamsport, Lycoming County and its juvenile probation office, including false arrest, false imprisonment, unlawful search and seizure, malicious prosecution, conspiracy to violate civil rights, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Johnson and Garrity seek a jury trial to determine actual and punitive damages and to cover their legal costs. In a partial motion to dismiss the case filed on Oct. 20, attorneys for Lycoming County argued that Hill was not involved in obtaining the search warrant and that he had no reason to know during the search that Johnson had been misidentified. They also argued that the exculpatory evidence was disclosed by juvenile probation officers to police soon after they obtained it. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Matthew W. Brann was receptive and dismissed all counts against Lycoming County and its juvenile probation office the same day. The response of the city of Williamsport to the lawsuit is due on Nov. 18 after Judge Brann granted the city an additional 45 days to respond.The city and the Williamsport Police Bureau police did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Atlanta Black Star.
