By Dave Wedge
The Boston Herald
March 26, 2001
(Brockton, MA) - A Brockton teen falsely accused of shooting a cop has hired a laywer who is planning on slapping the city and the officer with a mammoth civil rights suit.
“It was an outrage and there’s been no apology,” Brockton attorney Joseph Krowski said of the treatment his client, 19-year-old Clifford Montrond, received throughout the Officer David Alexis scandal. “He spent eight days in solitary confinement and he did nothing. He was working that day.”
Krowski said a civil suit will be filed against Alexis and the city of Brockton, and possibly against the town of Abington because information provided by one of their detectives led to Montrond’s arrest.
Alexis claimed to have been shot by a fleeing suspect March 1 but prosecutors allege he made up the story because he was distraught. Sources have told the Herald Alexis got two women pregnant and was having a host of personal problems for which he was in treatment.
Prosecutors say he shot at himself, sending a bullet tearing through his coat, and then concocted a story about a phantom gunman. He later picked Montrond out of a photo lineup. Prosecutors called the near-miss shooting a failed suicide attempt and charged Alexis with weapons violations and perjury for lying to a grand jury.
Montrond was arrested four days after the incident and spent eight days in jail, even after telling investigators that he was working at his family’s Newton auto shop, an alibi detectives later confirmed.
Krowski said Montrond was roughed up by police when he was arrested and was treated harshly in jail. He also said police should have quickly sensed there was something fishy with Alexis’ story.
“There were so many holes in his story, somebody should have stepped back and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ ” Krowski said. “It looked to me like a hoax from day one. It just didn’t sound right.”
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