By Annmaire Timmins
Concord Monitor
CONCORD, NH -- A former Concord police officer has been found guilty of assaulting two women, once at a downtown bar and later during an arrest.
Brian Longabardi, 27, formerly of Concord, stood trial on three counts of simple assault in Concord District Court in April. The charges alleged Longabardi groped the two women while outside a Concord bar in November 2008 and later grabbed one of the women by the arm while arresting her in January 2009.
In a ruling released yesterday, Judge F. Graham McSwiney found Longabardi guilty of all three charges. Sentencing is set for this month.
Longabardi can appeal the convictions to Merrimack County Superior Court and argue the case before a jury. Neither Longabardi nor his attorney, Darrin Brown, could be reached yesterday for comment.
When Longabardi went to trial in April, he faced a fourth charge of theft of services for walking out on a $20 bar tab at The Draft in a July 2009 incident unrelated to the simple assault charges. McSwiney convicted Longabardi of that charge immediately after hearing the evidence at the April trial.
But he delayed ruling on the simple assault charges because just as the trial ended, Brown objected to the wording of the assault complaints. Brown argued those charges should be dropped because the alleged assaults were not sufficiently detailed in the complaints. They accused Longabardi only of causing “unprivileged contact” with the women by “grabbing” each of them.
Prosecutor Peter Hinckley of the state attorney general’s office, which handled the case for the city prosecutor’s office so the city could avoid a conflict of interest, protested the delay. But McSwiney gave both attorneys additional time to submit written arguments on their positions.
McSwiney shared his analysis of those arguments in his three- page decision yesterday.
McSwiney agreed with Brown that the state Constitution requires that complaints be detailed enough to adequately inform the defendant of the charges against him. And he agreed that the simple assault complaints against Longabardi could have been more specific.
But McSwiney concluded that Longabardi had enough information between the complaints and the arrest warrant to fully understand what he was accused of.
“It is clear that Mr. Longabardi was aware from the outset how and where he was alleged to have assaulted the alleged victims,” McSwiney wrote.
Longabardi resigned from the Concord Police Department nearly a year ago.
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