(upbeat music) You're watching Newsday TV.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Ken Buffa.

In 2022, Newsday TV produced a documentary, Inside Internal Affairs.

The result of a two-year investigation into how Long Island's major police forces police themselves.

Here is Inside Internal Affairs.

(gentle music) - It was just absolutely the worst day of my life.

I hope I never experience anything even remotely like it ever again.

- On the afternoon of August 10th, 2020, an off-duty Suffolk County police officer critically injured two-year-old Riordan Cavooris.

For 48 hours, I didn't know if he would ever wake up.

Riordan Cavooris' story is one of eight cases that Newsday uncovered showing Nassau and Suffolk police imposed little or no discipline on officers in cases involving serious injuries or deaths.

There were things out of the ordinary about how the whole case was handled.

Things with no explanation.

Newsday documented the toll.

Four people dead.

- There's no reason he should have died.

No reason.

- And four people seriously injured.

- I should have been able to have at least one person I could have depended on.

- Survivors and families haunted by knowing that actions or inactions by members of Long Island's two major police forces left them with physical and emotional scars.

This is Newsday's investigation: Inside Internal Affairs.

[♪♪] And I screamed, like, "What do you mean Danny died?

How could Danny die?"

And she told me that Daniell was dead.

Daniel McDonnell and Dainell Simmons were mentally impaired men, who stopped breathing and died after struggles with Suffolk County Police.

What investigation?

- Officers arrested McDonnell on a misdemeanor charge.

He was calm and cooperated with police.

A sergeant refused to give McDonnell the medications he used to control bipolar disorder.

He had a psychiatric episode.

He told them from the beginning that he struggles with bipolar disorder and he needs medications.

Medication was brought.

He asked for it.

The mother brought it in.

How do you not provide it?

Thirteen officers joined in extracting McDonnell from a cell and in subduing him, often chest down in a position that risked suffocation.

Thirteen or fourteen individuals for one person who was in a holding cell.

Never wanted to, nor have I still to this day seen the pictures, and I don't want to.

I mean, there was a footprint on Danny's back.

Dainell Simmons was a son and a brother.

He was autistic and lived in a group home.

He was severely speech delayed, where he could only answer with one-word sentences.

What happened that night, everyone in our facility had funnel cake.

For some reason, they did not want to give Danielle the piece of funnel cake.

This kid that loves to eat, and he had an episode.

He was upset.

- Three Suffolk officers arrived to take Simmons to the hospital.

An officer mentioned handcuffs.

Simmons ran into another room.

The officers chased and started a struggle to handcuff him behind his back.

- He didn't see them as someone that was there to help him.

- After he was handcuffed, the officers pinned Simmons to the floor for an estimated nine minutes, often in a position that risks suffocation.

The medical examiner cited chest compression during a violent struggle.

- Officers placed their bodyweight on top of him for such a prolonged amount of time.

That clearly resulted in his death.

The medical examiner confirmed this.

- Internal Affairs filed no disciplinary charges against the officers.

The police department refused to give Newsday the case report, but lawsuit testimony provided a glimpse into the IA investigation.

An officer who pressed her weight on Simmons' torso after he was handcuffed behind his back testified that she was never interviewed for the departmental probe.

In the McDonnell case, a homicide detective found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing after interviewing the officers who helped subdue McDonnell.

Many of the interviews lasted for five minutes or less, according to his notes.

- The investigation was completely shoddy.

Period, point blank.

- The Suffolk Internal Affairs investigation upheld 10 counts of wrongdoing, but Internal Affairs missed the 18-month deadline for filing disciplinary charges.

There was no punishment.

I can't really give you a compelling answer for that.

Unit was swamped.

Really, without an influx of personnel, it was an uphill climb.

- Not one single person was held accountable for any misconduct.

It's appalling.

It's appalling.

If Danny did that to someone, he would have been held accountable, but because he's not a cop.

No one had one day off.

No one was suspended for a half a second.

Business as usual.

It's just the family that's left to pick up the pieces.

- Internal Affairs, or IA, is a unit within most police departments that is responsible for investigating police misconduct.

In other words, IA is supposed to police the police.

Michael Caldarelli commanded Suffolk's Internal Affairs unit from 2012 to 2014.

I made sergeant, then I made lieutenant, and I went to Internal Affairs as an investigator.

- In Newsday interviews, he said he was ordered to reform Internal Affairs and wound up transferred to a career-ending assignment when he tried to do just that.

I guess what struck me most about it was that it was an assignment with no downtime whatsoever.

You always had stuff to do.

The unit did not have adequate staff.

Cases were not getting done in a timely fashion.

And the one quote that really stuck with me was, "A decision has been made to keep internal affairs weak."

- Caldarelli was the only present or former Suffolk or Nassau police official willing to publicly discuss any of Newsday's eight case histories.

Nassau Commissioner Patrick Ryder declined interview requests.

Suffolk Commissioner Rodney Harrison declined or did not respond to interview requests.

He issued brief written statements about two cases.

The officers named in Inside Internal Affairs case histories either declined to speak on the record or did not respond to interview requests.

[MUSIC] >> That's my reason right here, right?

You'll see it comes down past my eye a little bit, and then goes all the way to like back here, like right here where there's another soft spot.

>> Julius Scott suffered traumatic brain injury in a car crash caused by off-duty Suffolk officer Weldon Drayton.

Drayton had been drinking that day.

>> Yes, of course.

I definitely would.

>> That's it?

Wow.

>> My heart is racing right now.

This is where he was in his friend's car.

Right.

Every time I go to that corner, it's heart-wrenching.

It's -- I have to go that way.

- Just a block from her house, Isabel Scott found her son critically injured.

- The sight that I seen was like unbelievable.

I never seen nothing like that in my life.

His whole scalp was in front of his face.

All this was hanging in his face and I didn't want to alert him, so I just took my hand and I rubbed it back.

This part, just rubbed it back and it's on.

Just calm down.

You know, it's gonna be okay.

The ambulance is coming.

You're going to be OK.

And he passed out.

- Drayton, a top DWI officer at the time, had been drinking at local bars.

Whether he was intoxicated will never be known.

First, a Suffolk Police Union delegate drove Drayton away from the scene to a hospital, in effect buying time for any alcohol in his system to dissipate.

When a police supervisor finally asked Drayton to submit to a breath test, Drayton refused.

Police issued a $150 ticket.

Later, an internal affairs investigation docked him four days pay.

- Do you think the police department should have given him a severe discipline?

Absolutely.

- The Inside Internal Affairs case histories often revealed the forces that blocked police discipline.

A police union contract spared Officer Michael Althouse after his actions led to a drunken driving death.

Althouse failed to subject Peter Fedden, a deli owner who gave discounted food to police officers, to sobriety testing after a high-speed crash.

Instead, Althouse drove Fedden home in a police car.

Within minutes, Fedden got the keys to his mother's car, drove at 100 miles per hour, and crashed again, this time fatally, into a brick wall.

His blood alcohol level was almost twice the legal limit for driving.

Internal Affairs substantiated a misconduct charge and called for Althouse to be fired.

But Althouse stopped the police commissioner from taking any action, as allowed by the contract.

An arbitrator kept him on the job.

In the case of cab driver Thomas Moroughan, top brass rejected an Internal Affairs finding of misconduct by two sergeants.

Off-duty Nassau officer Anthony DiLeonardo shot and wounded Moroughan without cause in a road rage incident.

DiLeonardo had been drinking.

Suffolk police had grounds to charge DiLeonardo with assault, criminal law experts said.

Instead, Suffolk police wrongfully charged Moroughan with assaulting DiLeonardo.

Internal Affairs Commander Caldarelli recommended charges against two sergeants in connection with the wrongful arrest.

On a copy of Caldarelli's report, the chief of detectives scrawled "DELETE" and "OUT" next to evidence.

Caldarelli stood firm, but the commissioner filed no charges.

- After the taxi cab case, you know, I was basically told to change my findings on that, and I refused.

That case was-that was the absolute last straw.

That was the one when I knew I was out of there.

(dramatic music) - In Wyandanch in 2017, two Suffolk officers pulled over a car for no reported reason.

They let the driver go, but arrested this young woman because of outstanding non-criminal warrants.

Inside the first precinct, they shackled the woman to a metal table in a holding area.

Then, one of the officers, Christopher McCoy, took the woman to a small room and shut the door.

- The officer brought me back into what I now know is a juvenile holding area.

There were no cameras.

It was just a closed-off area.

It looked like a small office type of situation.

And in there, he made me perform oral sex on him.

My choice was to either put my life in danger and tell him no or just to do it and live to tell somebody.

- After footsteps passed the door, McCoy stopped and brought her back to the holding area.

Later, McCoy and his partner, Mark Pav, returned the woman to the private room.

Pav left her alone with McCoy, and McCoy assaulted her again.

-And when he was done, he shoved a roll of tissue at me and told me to clean up and fix my hair.

-The woman also retained McCoy's DNA on her sweater for proof.

- I did, and I walked back and I sat back out in the holding area, and I had to act like everything was fine because I was surrounded.

It was just very hurtful on another level because I couldn't chalk this up to being like, "Oh, this is this one guy."

It was to a point where it was like, "No, this is a system.

Like they're leaving this man alone in this room to do what he's doing to me."

McCoy was sentenced to a year in federal prison after pleading guilty.

Pav denies knowledge of what McCoy had done, but Suffolk police regulations required officers to observe the well-being of prisoners at least every half hour and to log their observations.

Pav made nine false entries in a log, some recording that he had observed the woman during the period when McCoy had assaulted her.

The department missed the deadline to discipline Pav.

- We also have to look at everyone that was on in the precinct in that shift.

Everyone's walking past this room, this guy's in here with this woman by himself for an extended period of time, and he keeps bringing her back there.

They're comfortable for a reason.

This is a group effort.

It's not just him that should have been disciplined.

- For half a century in New York, a law known as 50-A imposed near total secrecy on police disciplinary records.

After the police murder of George Floyd, the state legislature repealed 50-A.

Lawmakers said all charges against police officers, substantiated and unsubstantiated, were open to public view.

Still, the Nassau Police Department kept almost all records sealed.

When documents were provided, they were often blacked out, almost to the point of being indecipherable.

The Suffolk Department released records only of substantiated charges, and only after delays as long as 18 months.

Lawsuits that allege misconduct by Nassau and Suffolk officers gave Inside Internal Affairs reporters a start on building their case histories.

The counties paid almost $15 million to settle those suits.

Those who were injured in the cases, their families, and the survivors of those who died suffered similar blockades in the search for answers.

In the case of Jo'anna Bird, the family waited more than a decade for Internal Affairs answers.

[MUSIC] When we arrived past the cemetery, she was telling me that she was going to be there one day, very soon.

- Mother of two, Jo'anna Bird, was trapped in a relationship with Leonardo Valdez-Cruz, an obsessed and violent gang member.

- He would be hiding behind her car, hiding in the bush, or hiding on the side of the house.

And he used to tase her and rape her and tell her how much he was going to kill her.

- Once, Valdez-Cruz kidnapped Bird at gunpoint, putting her in the trunk of his car.

- And I saw strangle marks.

And then she showed me her hip.

All the skin here was ripped up.

Bird attempted to break free from her relationship with Valdez-Cruz, also known as Pito.

From jail, he sent letters describing exactly how he would murder her.

Bird saved the letters as evidence to be used in the event of her death.

Bird did what she was supposed to do.

She got court orders barring Valdez-Cruz from coming near her.

He repeatedly ignored the orders.

So did the police.

- And all the cops would ever say was, "Take a walk, pito.

Go take a walk.

Get out of here."

He really was going to end up killing her, and the order of protection wasn't going to stop it.

Valdez-Cruz murdered Jo'anna Bird at her mother's house on March 19, 2009.

He stabbed her more times than the medical examiner could count, killing her exactly as he had described in his letters.

He was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

Nassau Internal Affairs investigated how police failed to protect Bird.

Newsday sought the file, including through court actions.

The department kept it secret for 12 years under 50A.

Then, the Nassau District Attorney's Office gave the 781-page file to USA Today, saying the repeal of 50A mandated its release.

USA Today partnered with Newsday.

Each produced its own report.

The file revealed that the department had charged 14 officers with misconduct.

Newsday uncovered that the department docked the officers between four hours and 24 days of sick and vacation time.

Among the most striking revelations, Detective Jeffrey Raymond maneuvered to have Valdez-Cruz, who was working as an informant, released from custody two days before Valdez-Cruz murdered Bird.

- I just wanted to go home.

So I was telling Raymond and the detectives who locked me up what they wanted to hear.

- Raymond is the officer who lost only four hours of pay.

He now commands the department's burglary squad.

-Police were called every day, every day, and all they did was tell them, "Let it take a walk and don't come back."

-I just don't think they did their job, and I think all of them should pay for it.

-Former Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey told Newsday that he wanted to impose tougher discipline, but the Nassau PBA used political muscle and stopped him.

-The fact that nobody lost their jobs in this case and that nobody was prosecuted in this case shows how invalid the process is when you have the police investigating themselves.

- Criminal justice experts reached similar conclusions after reviewing other Newsday case histories.

It is clear that these departments are not capable of properly investigating themselves.

It's very hard to investigate people that you work side by side with on a day-to-day basis, whose houses you may go to, who you may go to happy hour with.

To require or ask a homicide detective to investigate people in their own department is a very difficult task.

Just the, you know, the allegiance, the fact that they're both working for the same police department, they're both on the same side, I think is asking too much.

And that's why I'm a firm proponent of outside entities coming in to handle these types of investigations so that conflict of interest can be neutralized.

You know, if we could have the best of both worlds and have an outside agency investigating these things, but make sure that the outside agency has the resources, the expertise to handle it, that to me would be the best of both worlds.

I knew that the other driver had refused a field sobriety test.

I just thought it was kind of, I just wondered, you know, if he was not impaired, then why would he refuse?

-Security camera footage of the crash that severely injured two-year-old Riordan Cavooris illuminates actions by both the off-duty officer who caused the crash and the police response, including a PBA representative driving the officer away from the scene to a hospital.

There, the officer involved refused to submit to a breath test.

Police did not seek a court order for a blood alcohol test, preventing the district attorney from determining whether he was intoxicated and should be charged with assault for injuring Riordan.

- Kevin gave me the information that the other driver was a police officer.

It completely shifted my entire narrative of the situation, and I felt like I had to reprocess everything all over again.

- The officer involved was David Mascarella.

- They gave the off-duty officer more benefits than he was entitled to.

No other individual would get the same type of deference that this officer got at that seat.

- How the crash will affect Riordan's future worries his family.

- It was basically an uneven skull fracture.

So that part of it was depressed and pressing down on his brain.

And they had to do emergency surgery to repair his skull and to check his brain and to make sure there wasn't any further damage.

- It is with ice cream.

Show me where mint ice cream is.

- He had to learn everything again.

Every milestone that every new parent celebrates so much, whether a baby's doing it three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months, we went through all those.

And then we were back to square one.

- You gotta take it in your hand, goof.

- Part of what's so scary now, we just don't know what the future will bring.

There could be very, very long-lasting effects of this that might affect his ability to ever be employed, or the type of employment, or the quality of life he might have.

It might affect, ultimately, life expectancy and the age he actually lives to and what kind of a life he leads until then.

And we just don't know.

- Payroll records show the department has suspended Mascarella without pay.

A spokesperson for the department said they are moving to fire him.

But the Suffolk County police have refused to provide internal affairs documents to either the Cavooris family or to Newsday.

- We know that there are things you'll never know.

It's just the circumstance of the universe.

It's also so hard, in this case, to know if there are things we should know.

And they're being withheld from us.

It's impossible to move on until we get the answers that some people have and are telling us.

I know it's too late for anybody to be held truly accountable or, you know, at least acknowledge that there was wrongdoing and then try and fix, like, the policies.

I don't know the whole story.

I guess I'll never know the whole story.

The people that know the whole story... I hope you find out the whole story.

I would really like to know.

The thing too that I think a lot of people don't realize, justice helps.

Justice helps victims a lot.

I'm not worth anything is what I'm getting.

Yes, that's what a lot of victims hear, that I'm not worth anything when we don't get our justice.

(gentle music) - Since this documentary aired, Nassau and Suffolk police both adopted police reform plans as mandated by state law.

They each agreed to more widespread deployment of officer body cameras and have published more data on police interactions with the public.

Suffolk Police also started a civilian board to review some officer misconduct complaints.

But critics remain skeptical of the department's commitment to transparency and say that obtaining most disciplinary records and body camera footage is still difficult.