A Massachusetts state trooper recently filed a lawsuit alleging that police commanders reprimanded him and ordered the trooper to alter the arrest report for a local judge’s daughter. Besides removing the suspect’s embarrassing booking photo, the state police officials also ordered the trooper to redact her repeated offers of sex in exchange for leniency.
Around 7:35 p.m. on October 16, Trooper Ryan Sceviour was dispatched to a crashed Toyota Corolla on Route I-190. Sceviour arrived to discover the vehicle with heavy front end damage and two people standing beside the car.
Both Alli Bibaud and John Mclean identified Bibaud as the driver. After smelling a strong odor of alcohol from Bibaud, Sceviour ran her information and found she had an open case for heroin possession.
Before Sceviour asked Bibaud to perform a series of field sobriety tests, the trooper noticed fresh track marks on her arm and asked Bibaud when she last used heroin. She told him that she had nodded off earlier that morning around 9 a.m.
After failing all of the field sobriety tests, Bibaud was taken into custody while Sceviour located her heroin kit, consisting of a dozen hypodermic needles, a metal spoon, and small plastic baggies. Agreeing to take a breathalyzer, Bibaud registered nearly three times the legal blood-alcohol limit in two separate breathalyzer tests and was reportedly unable to provide her fingerprints because she kept slipping in and out of consciousness.
According to the initial arrest report, Bibaud was charged with operating a vehicle under the influence of narcotics, operating under the influence of alcohol, negligent operation of a motor vehicle, marked lanes violation, and an expired inspection sticker. Instead of serving time in jail, Bibaud was released on her own recognizance and picked up from the station by her father, Dudley District Court Judge Timothy Bibaud.
“Judge Timothy M. Bibaud never communicated with or contacted the District Attorney, State Police or any other court officials to discuss this case,” District Court Chief Justice Paul Dawley said in a statement Wednesday.
Two days after the arrest, a state trooper arrived at Sceviour’s house and ordered him to drive 90 miles to the State Police barracks in Holden. According to Sceviour’s lawsuit, police officials reprimanded him for including embarrassing details about Bibaud’s arrest in his report and ordered him to remove all references of the judge’s daughter offering sex in exchange for leniency and admitting to obtaining the drugs by performing sexual acts.
After approving Sceviour’s initial report, Sergeant Jason Conant also received a reprimand for not altering the arrest report. Sceviour’s lawsuit also alleges that troopers shredded a report written by Trooper Ali Rei who recorded Bibaud’s admission of performing oral sex to purchase heroin.
Besides shredding a report, police officials allegedly removed Bibaud’s booking photo from the altered arrest report. In her mug shot, Bibaud foolishly smiles with her head cocked to the side and her eyes barely open.
“We expect the State Police administration to enforce the law, not break it,” Sceviour’s lawyer, Lenny Kesten told The Boston Globe. “What they did to Trooper Sceviour is shameful.”
According to Sceviour, the police officials informed him that they had received their orders directly from State Police Colonel Richard McKeon. In a recent statement, the Massachusetts State Police declared, “Supervisory members of the State Police, up to and including the Colonel, may review any report and have the responsibility to order any appropriate revisions. In the report in question, the revision consisted only of removal of a sensationalistic, directly-quoted statement by the defendant, which made no contribution to proving the elements of the crimes with which she was charged.”
“I am deeply troubled by the serious breach of ethics perpetrated by the colonel and his leadership team,” Dana Pullman, president of the State Police Association of Massachusetts, said in a written statement. “For State Police leadership to demand falsification of official police reports and deletion of the daily administrative record is criminal.”
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