Convicted of assault for getting assaulted

A timeline of political retribution in this city under the dome

Feb 17, 2026

If you haven’t read it yet, I wrote a prosecutor-centered story on the conviction against Etel Haxhiaj for the Shoestring, went up Friday. “Northwestern Assistant DA convicts Worcester ICE protester”

And tonight I finally finished organizing, dividing and heavily correcting the audio of all the available video from the various “pool photographers” there for the trial. It’s almost like the Worcester District Court makes it very hard to hear the lawyers and the judges on purpose. Hm. Good thing there are limiters and clippers and expanders and equalizers and noise subtraction and compression and all sorts of other fancy things to get around that. So yeah, pretty much the entire thing is now available via this playlist, which is, for the time being, set to unlisted so as to make the haters work for it: Haxhiaj trial videos.

Boy was that project a pain in the ass from start to finish. But it’s worth it in a big way to have a preserved record of the most garish police corruption and political persecution in recent memory, especially the police testimony. Shauna McGuirk’s testimony is worth a watch for sure. She lies hard, in obvious ways, as I’ll explain more later down. The more you learn the worse it gets.

Big ups to Andrew Quemere, tender of the Mass Dump, who came to court equipped with a video camera and permission from a judge to use it but was still prevented by court officers from doing so. He appealed, the appeal got denied despite him highlighting the language that made it permissible, then he dealt with the majority of the work that goes into tracking down the footage from cameramen who did not want to give it to us.

The main section today is a piece I wrote up for Welcome to Hell World initially but Luke and I agreed it was a bit too “in the weeds” for a non-Worcester audience. It is, however, less in the weeds than I would typically write in here. So just for the sake of switching it up, and because I’m partial to the way I opened the piece, I’m going to leave the text of it mostly intact.

First though be sure to read the interview Luke did with Etel which was really good. Went up this morning, check it out.

So you lost re-election in November. I assume that this all played a pretty big role, right? They must have tried to hammer you with all this stuff.
Yeah, the police union president literally went door to door, campaigned against me and in support of my opponent, who is a supporter of the police department’s practices and union... He’s taking victory laps now through his comments saying that he’s responsible for me losing the election and now getting convicted… And I think what happened on Eureka Street, a lot of people didn’t like, and that also played a huge factor in my not getting re-elected.
There’s something so pathetic about how the police react to something like the minor brushing of a police officer. They try to make it out like you were a boxer or something, you know, like you were squaring up against them. Don’t you find that kind of absurd?
I find it extremely dangerous. One of the bigger worries that I had after this decision and conviction is that it allows police departments to not only stack charges against their political opponents when they have an opportunity, but any claims and truth of self-defense in response to excessive force can now be considered an act of aggression from an unarmed civilian.
In my case it was very clear that these charges were politically motivated. The officer in question amended her police report days after the incident. And so this, in my opinion, sets a very dangerous precedent about how police departments can use this particular statute and charges against their political opponents or any civilians who merely react reflexively in protection of their bodies when a police officer uses excessive force.

In an ideal world I’d have a second reporter working full time on the four state police troopers now indicted for the death of Enrique Delgado Garcia. This being an un-ideal world, I’ll defer to the Telegram’s Brad Petrishen, who put up a good one the other day: “State police lieutenant charged in Delgado-Garcia’s death was promoted in 2025”

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Convicted of assault for getting assaulted

By Bill Shaner

Nine months ago I wrote a piece for Welcome To Hell World about an ICE raid in Worcester, MA, the mid-sized and one-time industrious city in the middle of the state, always just getting on or just falling off the map. It’s a city said by native son John Lurie to have a dome over it that keeps out God. It’s a city where the police department promotes from within and the DA buys the local professional hockey team a Zamboni. A city where a DA gets away with buying a Zamboni and calling it a community reinvestment of asset forfeiture money—cash, cars, and other equities seized from a reliable criminal class. The criminal class is one the city has cultivated, whether incidentally or intentionally, in pockets of the urban core best thought of as containment zones. These zones were written a century ago into the zoning code and, incidentally or intentionally, cemented a few years later by the highway that bisects the heart of the city like a stake though a heart. They are surrounded, incidentally or intentionally, by the walled gardens of “single family neighborhoods,” ensuring the poor neighborhoods remain perpetual economic flood zones. Incidentally or intentionally, a good percentage of these areas are also literal flood zones. Incidentally or intentionally, the courthouse is the both the most opulent building downtown and also the most prone by a mile to suicide-by-jumping attempts. It’s perhaps the only building in America where such attempts are more likely to be made on the inside. Like a spiked pit, the middle of the building is a straight shot from fourth floor to bottom. A glass-lined marble staircase in the center of the pit gives you a panorama view as you round the corners. If someone were to jump you could watch them from top to bottom without interruption. Caught at the right angle you’d watch them fall past an eight foot four inch plaster recreation of Michelangelo Moses statue. Sigmund Freud wrote about the statue at length, once suggesting it depicts the biblical figure in a moment of repose after violently lashing out in anger.

Anyway in that piece for Hell World I wrote:

A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.

The story detailed what was evident to everyone who saw it firsthand: the local police department descended onto the scene in force to help ICE get away with what turned out to be an illegal deportation attempt on a woman with an open asylum claim—who has since had her stay granted but nevertheless spent six months in various ICE detention facilities before her release in October.

This was back before LA or Chicago or Minneapolis, in retrospect one of the first glimpses of the DHS’ new street rip regime, at that point just gearing up to terrorize city after city, the perpetual misery carnival on tour we now know so well.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the city’s political apparatus set itself to two goals: to say that the police were there to “preserve the peace” and that they did not, in any way, help ICE, and to make villains of the community members who showed up that day on behalf of their neighbor. People who actually helped and actually had her safety in mind.

The city’s real power brokers, all of whom are somehow police officials, arrived after a few hectic days at the perfect way to get the two birds stoned: pressing charges on a sitting city councilor who was among the community members there that day, and bravely did what she could to stop masked agents of the state from whisking a constituent of hers away from her family and into the forced removal machine. A woman who was herself at one time a refugee from a repressive regime and who is herself a mother. They soon charged her with assault and battery on a police officer and interfering with police.

Today I write to report that this blue city in a blue state was remarkably successful in executing this campaign, having achieved last week the final piece of the puzzle: a conviction.

My head’s still fuzzy with the psychic whiplash of a two-day trial Tuesday and Wednesday in which that city councilor, Etel Haxhiaj, was found guilty of assault and battery on a public employee by a six person jury in Worcester District Court, but, bewilderingly, was also found innocent of a second charge: interfering with police.

The evidence police presented is footage of one of the clearest instances of a cop assaulting Haxhiaj available. Here’s the clip I made showing the moment from every available angle, including the officer’s own camera.

The case became whether Haxhiaj touched officer Shauna McGuirk during the process of being grabbed, pulled and thrown by McGuirk. Cherry on top: during the trial we learned definitively that McGuirk grabbed and threw Haxhiaj because an ICE agent asked her to. He asked if McGuirk could “take care of that” and she did.

How you can do one without the other—assault and batter the police but not interfere with them—is a good question. The answer in this particular case isn’t much of a riddle: Haxhiaj did neither, and refused to sign a statement drafted by the special prosecutor admitting she did assault a cop and apologizing for it. This refusal to concede the truth to the cops forced the case to a jury trial.

From there, the district court functioned as designed: as an appendage of the police, retroactively grafting a veneer of officiality and impartiality over what was a dirty job from inception to conclusion, soup to nuts.

Time to explain why! First, gotta tap the sign: “Welcome to Massachusetts — The More You Learn, The Worse It Gets.”

Haxhiaj was sentenced on Wednesday to six months probation and 40 hours of community service. The police, I’m told, threw a raucous party that night at an Italian restaurant known locally to be “for cops” on the townie stronghold that is lower Shrewsbury Street.

A brief timeline is in order.

May 8 - Eureka Street incident. Haxhiaj is not arrested

May 8 - Officer Shauna McGuirk writes an incident report.

May 9 - Police union president Thomas Duffy calls for Haxhiaj to be charged federally, saying “we demand accountability for all criminal and ethically deplorable behavior”

May 10-11 (?) - Thomas Duffy is allegedly overheard by dozens of people shouting at Police Chief Paul Saucier in his office, threatening mutiny if Haxhiaj was not charged, according to a well sourced story in This Week In Worcester.

May 11 - Shauna McGuirk’s incident report is revised. What it said on the first draft versus the version we have now is anyone’s guess. During the trial we learned she revised her report after reviewing body camera footage.

May 12 - Charges against Haxhiaj are filed by way of a clerk magistrate hearing, authored by Lt. John Bossolt, based on McGuirk’s revised statement of facts.

June - A clerk magistrate hearing allows one charge of assault and battery and one charge of interfering with police to move forward. Another charge of assault and battery was dismissed due to lack of evidence. The police officer there on the department’s behalf did not have the evidence on hand of the charge that went forward, but the assistant clerk seems to have seen it elsewhere, if you read the transcript of the hearing filed with the motion to dismiss it’s like they were in the same group chat or something.

September - Haxhiaj files a motion to dismiss at a pretrial hearing. Just before the hearing, Thomas Duffy walked into the courtroom—before it was open to the public, past dozens of Haxhiaj supporters—to have a private conversation with Steven Gagne, the outside prosecutor brought in to try the case in the place of District Attorney Joe Early, who recused himself due to an unstated conflict of interest.

From September to November, Duffy actively campaigned against Haxhiaj in her council district.

In the November 4 election, Haxhiaj put up the best numbers of her council career and still lost to a former boxer who visibly struggles to form sentences but had the police unions’ backing. From his 2023 loss to 2025 victory, said boxer, Jose Rivera, picked up a 30 percent increase in votes, a statistical anomaly in a city where the electorate is stubbornly small and solidified.

Later in November, a judge denied Haxhiaj’s motion to dismiss the case, saying assault involves “touching, however slight.”

In late December, Duffy sued local journalist Tom Marino of This Week In Worcester, who reported out the account of his meeting with the chief in the aftermath of Eureka Street. The suit seeks $10,000,000 in damages for one count of defamation. Richard Rafferty, a personal injury lawyer who represents Duffy’s union, used to represent a state police union, and who at one time did a commercial with Adam Vinatieri.

And now, this week, the trial...

Before the trial began, Gagne, the outside prosecutor, filed a motion to bar the defense from bringing Duffy in to testify. Liz Halloran, Haxhiaj’s defense attorney, argued Duffy’s testimony would be relevant to the political context of the charges: specifically, why they were filed four days after the fact. The judge sided with Gagne, saying Duffy’s testimony would not be relevant to the matter of assault and battery on a public official.

Shortly before the trial began on Tuesday morning, the judge, Zachary Hillman, agreed with Gagne and blocked Duffy from taking the stand. He also blocked any mention of the Department of Justice investigation into the Worcester Police Department made public in December, 2024.

The inability to call Duffy to testify left Haxhiaj’s defense unable to make the case the charges were politically motivated, he being the person doing all the motivating. Every time the discussion turned political, Gagne quickly objected and the judge sustained it.

The end result was a void. The narrative presented to the jury, absent the political reality to contextualize it, left a hole. Gagne then filled it with a fiction. Haxhiaj, he said, thinks she’s above the law.

“I seem to be hearing this argument from the defense that some things arrived here because she didn’t get cuffed that day. As if she was treated differently because she was a city councilor,” Gagne said to a jury unaware of how she was being treated politically in real life. “Now maybe, in fact, she was, but to her benefit. If anybody else other than the city councilor had done what she did that day, they probably would have ended up in cuffs. But Officer McGurk, with her radar antennas up, said if I start cuffing a Worcester city councilor in the middle of this crowd, things are going to go from bad to worse.”

The officer Haxhiaj is alleged to have assaulted, Shauna McGuirk, gave conflicting testimony in her several hours on the stand Tuesday. She said first that she put one hand on Haxhiaj to escort her away from the vehicle, but Haxhiaj was “pushing her body away from me and into the vehicle.” Then, just a few minutes later, she changed the story.

“She pushed me with both her hands and was pushing me with her right hand into my left shoulder, making me stumble back.”

The body camera from multiple angles clearly shows McGuirk to be lying about that. She goes up to Haxhiaj, grabs her, throws her. She was not pushed and did not lose her balance.

Though it was not made clear to the jury, Gagne used a clip of a different moment than the one McGuirk describes. The slow motion video he showed occurs directly after McGuirk asserts Haxhiaj pushed into her. Gagne must have known that, having reviewed all the footage to put the case together. He didn’t bother to correct her. Pointing out a lie told by police does not help secure a conviction.

Despite the best efforts of the defense to make the absurdity transparent, Haxhiaj was convicted of assault for getting assaulted.

As these things go, the judge read the fine points of the law into the record for the jury’s understanding after both the defense and the prosecution had rested. One of those fine points struck me as so absurd I almost burst out laughing. The definition of a public employee—the law is technically “assault and battery on a public employee,” it’s just that cops are the only ones who use it—applies to Haxhiaj, perhaps more so than to McGuirk. But Haxhiaj isn’t able to bend the law, the district court, the legal proceedings and the opinion of the presiding judge to a shape that suits a narrative she wants imposed. The cops can.

Fun fact: the state of Massachusetts does not track disposition data, i.e. how a case was resolved, especially not at the district court level. In preparation for the trial I tried to track it down, going so far as to formally request the data from the court administrator. In a terse statement emailed to me, Administrator Thomas Ambrosino wrote, “We do not provide information on method of disposition.”

If that’s not the whole police state in plain sight right there, in that sentence...

You track charges, the demographic data of those charged and the in flow and out flow from the jails (recidivism), but you don’t track how often a charge pressed by police gets the hearing it’s supposed to in the way our system functions on paper, how often the defendant is actually found guilty or innocent versus how often they get bullied into a watered down admission of guilt via a plea deal.

To take a case like this to trial rather than accept the plea was in its own way a radical act for Haxhiaj. It made the system show itself for what it really is.

Yesterday, police union official Thomas Duffy, with whom Gagne was seen having private conferences with over the months leading up to the trial, as well as during the two day trial itself, released a statement via The Worcester Guardian, putting the trial in overtly political context.

“Last November city residents sent a strong message in our local election and today Etel Haxhiaj was convicted by a jury of her peers for assault and battery on a Worcester police officer.”

After a judge found his testimony to be irrelevant to the matter at hand, he puts out a statement demonstrating exactly why it was necessary to the defense. He continues...

“We can never allow or tolerate violence of any kind to be directed at any member of law enforcement. In recent days we have seen multiple officers shot in Spencer and Fall River, we continue to pray for their recovery. We ask that God always protect members of law enforcement as they perform this dangerous job. I want to thank the overwhelming majority of citizens of this city who show support for our officers as they perform a difficult and dangerous job daily.”

Duffy’s statement is complemented nicely by one issued to the local cable access station Friday by DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.

“District Councilor for the City of Worcester Etel Haxhiaj pulled a political stunt and incited chaos by trying to obstruct law enforcement’s lawful arrest of a criminal illegal alien. It’s disgraceful that elected officials, like District Councilor Haxhiaj, are fighting to protect violent illegal aliens-in this case an illegal alien who assaulted a pregnant woman—over the safety of law-abiding Americans. This stunt by sanctuary lawmakers put the safety of our law enforcement agents at risk. ICE officers are facing a 1300% increase in assaults while carrying out arrests.”

In keeping with tradition, the DHS has not revised its position on Roseane Oliveira De Ferreira’s criminality nor immigration status, despite the fact the charges against her were dropped in July (and, if she wasn’t abducted by ICE agents, would have been dropped in May) and her asylum claim was granted in October.

Of late, Democratic officials in this state and across the country have talked a big game about ICE. But for months, here in Worcester, we have seen a willing ICE collaborator in Thomas Duffy—he said as much on WBUR, that their “first responsibility” was protecting the ICE agents—go on a full political offensive against a woman brave enough to stick up to ICE, using the power and the time afforded by his municipal position and salary and his obvious sway over the justice system. And no one with the power to put an end to it did so—not the mayor or the city manager or two different district attorneys or the governor or the congressman, who openly calls for the abolition of ICE.

The question becomes whether they have the power they’re supposed to have—if anyone can actually impose a check on a police union official’s ability to abuse power. Is it that they chose not to put a lid on Duffy’s rampage, or that they couldn’t?

Before the jury officially came out of its zone of sequestering to read the verdict, the word had somehow gotten out. As dozens of Haxhiaj supporters gathered outside the courtroom, a court officer opened the door and, looking past all of them, gave the cops on the other side of the hall a big thumbs up. A few minutes later, Gagne came out and did the same, looking right at Duffy and waving him over. Then they tried to let just the cops in, past the public, but got called on it, and clumsily sent the cops back out so they could open the doors to everyone—something they obviously wouldn’t have done if someone hadn’t said something.

Worcester Sucks and I Love It

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