Open notebook: Haxhiaj and Spring motion to dismiss hearings

A live and unvarnished info dump

Both Councilor Etel Haxhiaj and one-time school committee candidate Ashley Spring had hearings this morning on motions to dismiss. The state contested both motions to dismiss, setting both cases up for the strong possibility of full trials. Next dates set for Nov. 19 in both cases.

This is a new thing I’m trying here: a pure notebook dump, refreshing as I have more. I have a hard out at five today. Going to see Tyler Childers at whatever the Mansfield place is called! Very stoked. Tomorrow I’m driving for six hours to a wedding. The time crunch has forced me to innovate. I don’t want to go until the weekend without saying anything, so I’m opening the door to the sausage factory. Later in the week I’ll have a proper rundown of the events and their significance. Here goes.

If you were there, feel free to drop some observations in the chat.

—After the hearing, Etel Haxhiaj addressed dozens of (soaked) supporters.

I stand here unequivocally clear before you maintaining my innocence as I have from day one. And I am hopeful that the judge will too. For most people in Worcester and across the nation, my actions on Eureka Street are very clear. Together with other community members, I stood up for a mother and her children, seeking answers, seeking a just process, asking for due process. I challenged the use of unnecessary police force on a traumatized teenager, watching her mother being dragged by masked armed men.

I don’t think any of us want to live in a country, a state or a city where masked men are snatching people off our neighborhoods and elected leaders and community members are dragged to court for protecting their constituents.

What happened on Eureka Street, let’s be clear, has eroded trust between law enforcement and the community at a time when immigrant families in Worcester are literally being torn apart by racial profiling and xenophobia. So I believe and I maintain that these charges are politically motivated, not dissimilar to what we are seeing play out in the news daily at incarceration center outside of our schools and now in the halls of Congress.

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—Police union official Thomas Duffy—the man perhaps solely responsible for their being any charges against Haxhiaj at all—sat in the front row the whole time, just behind and to the left of the special prosecutor Steven Gagne, assistant district attorney to Northwest District Attorney Dave Sullivan, out in western Mass. Duffy approached Gagne for two private conversations, one directly before and one directly after the hearings. I was next to John Keough of This Week In Worcester when he asked Duffy for comment. A curt no.

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3:28 p.m.

Some new documents:

—The motion to dismiss filed by Haxhiaj’s attorney Liz Halloran, including a transcript that shows the cops unable to show when exactly Etel did the assaulting.

—State’s opposition to Spring’s motion to dismiss and same document for Haxhiaj

—Gagne made it clear he intends to pursue only the water hitting the cop angle in Spring’s case, saying it constitutes assault, just not felony assault (dangerous weapon, the charge he dropped at the last court date). Gagne filed a bill of particulars in support of that move today.

Not quite sure what a ‘bill of particulars’ is. But consider it my new nickname.

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3:53 p.m.

Some photos of the demonstrators! All are mine. Mine. Feel free to use em however you please though I do not care at all.

The court guards were trying to get everyone to move to the other side of the street, citing some fucking statute about how it’s illegal.

I have the printout that they were passing around. The guy said I could keep it.

This was not invoked the first time we did this, during Etel’s arraignment, despite what the guy said about how this is the same way it goes every single time.

A cop came over and said the guards insist that demonstrators get on the other side of the street. “All the fancy brick” he told them was courthouse property. The fancy brick was covering the entire sidewalk in front of this public building. It seems the compromise was the cops-only idling lane dutifully provided by the city of Worcester.

There were flowers waiting for Etel and Ashley. Big, beautiful flowers.

This last one is in support of the Pipe Rock Theory.

Entire mountains are not real

This is real stone though. It just looks fake.

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