A former Bethel police officer who currently faces criminal charges for allegedly brutally assaulting a man following a traffic stop and lying about the incident is now being sued by the victim in civil court.
The civil suit is rooted in a December 2023 incident that began as a police traffic stop of a vehicle driven by 44-year-old Bernard Mael. After a pursuit through a Bethel neighborhood, Mael was treated for injuries at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation hospital.
According to a civil complaint filed in Bethel Superior Court on Dec. 6, former Bethel Police officer Jonathan Murphy allegedly inflicted injuries on Mael that resulted in permanent brain damage and have hampered Mael’s ability to engage fully in daily activities.
The civil complaint says that the incident involved escalating violence, and also names another Bethel police officer and the City of Bethel as defendants.
Mael is represented by attorneys Myron Angstman, Spencer Wilson, and Joshua Fannon.
Angstman said that the civil case is largely based on the criminal charges, which were filed in August and are based on body cam footage of the incident.
"The state, when it filed its charges, included a bunch of information in support of the charges, and that's where we got all of the information that we included in our civil complaint," Angstman said. "Reading those facts from the criminal complaint, it certainly presents a disturbing situation for me and, I suspect, to the community as well."
The civil complaint begins by detailing the initial traffic stop, in which Murphy allegedly tried to pull Mael from the vehicle and punched him twice in the face with a closed fist, despite Mael’s attempts to comply with commands. Mael then drove away.
At some point, following a pursuit, Mael’s vehicle went off the road and became wedged against a snowbank. During this second stop, Murphy allegedly tased Mael multiple times without any verbal warning. When Mael closed his driver side door and locked the car, another officer, Jonathan Bouma, allegedly smashed the window in, allowing Murphy to then pepper spray Mael.
In what the civil complaint describes as a “blitz attack,” Bouma and another officer next smashed in the vehicle’s passenger windows and tased Mael multiple times, at which point the complaint says that Murphy pointed his service weapon at Mael and demanded that he raise his hands.
The civil complaint alleges that Murphy then holstered his weapon and punched Mael more than a dozen times in the head in rapid succession, pulling Mael’s hands away from his face to deliver additional blows.
In justifying the use of force, Murphy wrote in his report that Mael had struck him with the vehicle in the initial traffic stop. Both the civil and criminal complaints assert that footage from a body cam worn by Bouma does not show the vehicle hit any part of Murphy’s body. Murphy’s body cam was not activated at the time of the incident.
The civil complaint goes on to say that Murphy lied to fellow officers during the course of the incident, and later admitted to investigators with the Alaska State Troopers that he had made false statements.
Bouma, the other Bethel police officer named in the civil suit, initially corroborated Murphy’s account of the incident in his report. He later told Alaska State Troopers that this was based on what Murphy told him, rather than a review of his own body cam footage. Bouma also signed a sworn affidavit in support of felony assault charges against Mael for the falsified vehicle incident that were later dismissed.
According to Bethel Police, Murphy resigned following the incident and Bouma no longer works for the department. Murphy was recently hired as chief of police for the Diamond City Police Department in Arkansas, according to that city’s website.
The civil complaint asks for financial damages against Murphy, Bouma, and the City of Bethel in an amount to be determined by jury trial. The City of Bethel is being sued based in part on claims that the city was negligent in hiring, retention, and training.
An attorney for the City of Bethel said that the city could not comment on pending litigation.
The next hearing in the civil case has not been set. The next hearing for the criminal case against Murphy is scheduled for Feb. 3 in Bethel court. No criminal charges have been filed against Bouma.
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