...[Holyoke Police Detective] Paul C. Barkyoumb appeared in family court in Rockville, Conn., last week after his former girlfriend Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s top victim witness advocate and a former assistant district attorney for Hampden County, filed complaints that he was sending threatening text messages to her. Thursday she won a six-month stay-away order...I want to comment but I'd be speaking as if Detectve Barkyoumb is guilty so I'll pause. With the strong evidence pointing to him I hope a GPS ankle bracelet will be put on him - and DILIGENTLY MONITORED while he is being investigated. A stay-away order isn't enough if he made the hateful threats.
HOLYOKE POLICE DETECTIVE PAUL BARKYOUMB COULD FACE CHARGES FROM CONNECTICUT STATE POLICE
The Republican - MassLive.com - Jeanette DeForge
By Jeanette DeForge
October 05, 2009
[Excerpts] Connecticut State Police may file criminal charges against a Holyoke police detective accused of stealing a cell phone during a drug raid and using it to threaten his ex-girlfriend... Paul C. Barkyoumb appeared in family court in Rockville, Conn., last week after his former girlfriend Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s top victim witness advocate and a former assistant district attorney for Hampden County, filed complaints that he was sending threatening text messages to her. Thursday she won a six-month stay-away order issued by Judge Elliot N. Solomon. During the court hearing, Solomon found that Barkyoumb stole a cell phone during a Sept. 4 drug raid on an apartment at 527 Bridge St. in Holyoke and used it to send the messages, after hearing testimony from witnesses... Barkyoumb was also in the center of a controversy in January when Hampden Superior Court Judge Cornelius J. Moriarty II threw out drug evidence in a major case after questioning the honesty of the officer’s testimony. In that evidentiary hearing, Moriarty ruled that Barkyoumb had “demonstrated an unhesitating willingness to offer false testimony”... [Full article here]
MYSTERY PHONE' TEXT THREATS PROBED
masslive.com
By STEPHANIE BARRY
October 04, 2009
[Excerpts] A Holyoke police detective whose credibility was assailed by a local judge earlier this year now faces a restraining order, after a Connecticut judge found he stole a suspect's cell phone during a drug raid and sent his ex-girlfriend threatening text messages with it. Paul C. Barkyoumb, a 13-year police veteran, lost his gun and has been shelved on "desk duty" as Holyoke police launch an internal investigation and a probe by Connecticut State Police continues. After three days of testimony in family court in Rockville, Conn., Judge Elliot N. Solomon called Barkyoumb "absolutely corrupt" and chastised him for exposing his entire police department to scrutiny... Holyoke Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said he confiscated Barkyoumb's weapon when his ex-girlfriend won a temporary restraining order in the Connecticut court last month. Barkyoumb's former girlfriend, Michelle Cruz, Connecticut's top victim witness advocate and a former assistant district attorney for Hampden County, on Thursday won a six-month stay-away order... "Y R U afraid? Psycho, dike (sic) bitch ... I will find a way to get you back," the anonymous texts read, in part. They were sent from a New York telephone number Cruz didn't recognize... Elizabeth Perez, of New York City, testified on Thursday that the telephone number which generated the texts to Cruz was hers, and produced a receipt to document she purchased the phone on Aug. 25. The paperwork bore the same number as the "mystery phone" that sent the texts. Speaking through a Spanish interpreter, Perez, 37, told the judge she had never met Cruz before, but she remembered Barkyoumb well... "Like U left me alone. Psycho c***. I will find a way to get you back." The second round of messages included references to Barkyoumb's birthday and plans to go to Cape Cod... A former prosecutor in Hampden County who handled domestic crimes and sexual assaults, Cruz was in 2007 appointed by the governor of Connecticut to be the state victim advocate. "This happened to me because I broke up with him," she said of Barkyoumb, adding that she sought help from Holyoke police when Barkyoumb began harassing her in the spring. "The Holyoke PD failed me. They had every opportunity to rein him in, and they just didn't." [LINK] or [LINK]
STATE VICTIM ADVOCATE GETS RESTRAINING ORDER
By Journal Inquirer Staff
October 5, 2009
[Excerpts] Connecticut’s victim advocate has obtained a civil restraining order of her own against a former boyfriend, a police detective in Holyoke... Judge Elliot N. Solomon concluded after a hotly contested three-day hearing last week in Vernon Superior Court that the detective, Paul C. Barkyoumb, had sent threatening text messages to the victim advocate, Michelle S. Cruz, the newspaper reported... Barkyoumb and Cruz, a former Massachusetts prosecutor, had dated for two years and had bought a home together, but she broke off their relationship in April... Cruz subsequently started receiving threatening text messages from a telephone number she didn’t recognize. The number turned out to belong to Elizabeth Perez of New York City, described by the Sunday Republican as a drug defendant whose cell phone was taken during a raid at a Holyoke apartment on Sept. 4... Barkyoumb denied taking the telephone and suggested that another officer may have done so out of envy of his rapid rise in the Holyoke Police Department... [Full article here]
[Backup articles]
[police, police officer, officer involved, domestic violence, law enforcement, cop on advocate, cop on attorney, connecticut, massachusetts, misogyny, misongynist]
A peek inside my head: I'm praying Barkyoumb will humble himself, be honest in these legal matters, and put his old life on the alter.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I said it.
God and I had an argument in my kitchen 28 years ago and by the time we were done I couldn't even recognize the person that I was. It's real. My life changed that day. Of course I did all the audible talking, but it was the pivotal moment of my life. Everything I was bound by was lifted. Everything I loved I no longer even liked, and... and... and...
I'm praying for Ms. Cruz to be safe, upheld and supported through this, and not penalized professionally.
This is sad reminder to the folks in her area that no one is immune from domestic violence.
Though there are usually early warning signs of an abusive personality, the real test of a person is when they don't get what they want. Sometimes that can't be known until you are too far in.
To think otherwise is to believe the victim is always at fault.
New York - Barbara Sheehan, facing a murder trial for shooting her ex-NYPD Polce Sgt. husband Raymond, was on Oprah. Oprah asked battered-for-years Barbara what someone could have done 2 years ago to ward off the fatal day, and Barbara's answer impressed me. She said 2 years ago was already too late. She implored people to get away at the very first sign of abuse... to not wait. The longer you are there the harder it will be to get away.
I don't know if that applies to this situation but I'll use any opportunity to share it.
The comprehension test:
If you are with someone who begins to abuse you:
A.) Try to get them help
B.) Avoid angering them, accept responsibility (blame yourself), and try harder to make them happy.
C.) Make excuses for them (be "understanding") and hope for the best.
D.) Run.
Victim advocate describes harassment by ex-boyfriend
ReplyDeleteBy Alex Wood
Journal Inquirer
Published: Tuesday, October 6, 2009 11:34 AM EDT
Connecticut’s victim advocate, Michelle S. Cruz, says that after she broke up with her boyfriend, a police detective in Holyoke, Mass., in the spring, she began receiving unwanted calls and text messages from him on her cell phone.
She says she asked the ex-boyfriend, Paul Barkyoumb, to stop, then blocked his number. But Cruz says he began texting her on her state-issued cell phone, and she had to go through state channels to have those messages blocked as well.
“He would go back and forth between trying to get me to go back, which I wasn’t, and getting angry and frustrated,” Cruz told the Journal Inquirer on Monday.
She contacted a sergeant in the Holyoke Police Department and requested that someone talk to Barkyoumb “and encourage him to stop sending the text messages,” Cruz recalled in a statement she gave this month to two members of the Connecticut State Police Central District Major Crime Squad. “This caused Paul to attempt to contact me even more.”
Cruz then complained to police in South Hadley, Mass., where she owns a house. They directed Barkyoumb to stop contacting her. That worked for a couple of weeks, she recalled, until Barkyoumb sent her a “letter of apology” in July in which he said he loved her and wanted to be with her.
She reported the letter to South Hadley police, who suggested that she apply for a civil restraining order. She says she was hesitant but eventually did so after Barkyoumb tried to contact her son — and his daughter tried to contact Cruz.
She says she received the restraining order from the Belchertown, Mass., District Court for a week but that it wasn’t reinstated because there was no physical violence. Still, the attempts at contact stopped for some time.
Troubling texts
But at 12:01 p.m. on Sept. 9, Cruz got this cell phone text message from a number she didn’t recognize: “I will get you back for it.”
“Who’s this?” she replied.
At 2:40 p.m., she received the response, “Guess. I won’t tell. Psycho.”
“Don’t text me again,” she responded.
“Y R U afraid,” came the response at 2:52 p.m.
After some additional dialogue, another message, at 4:19 p.m., asked, “R U afraid?” followed by a string of insults.
The dialogue ended when Cruz wrote, “Leave me alone,” and received the response at 5:55 p.m.: “Like U left me alone,” followed by an obscene insult. “I will find a way to get you back.”
Even as this exchange was going on, around 3:10 p.m., Cruz says she made a complaint at Connecticut State Police Troop H in Hartford, alleging that she was being threatened. She says she waited in the lobby for over an hour, then left because she had to pick up her daughter.
Search for help
She received a call from a trooper later that afternoon but was dissatisfied and didn’t get the impression the complaint would be fully investigated. On the advice of a former co-worker in Massachusetts, she contacted Massachusetts State Police and gave a statement to a trooper around 6:30 p.m.
The following day, Sept. 10, she got a call from a trooper in Connecticut’s Central District Major Crime Squad, who told her the case had been reassigned from Massachusetts to Connecticut and that he would be investigating...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete...The Connecticut State Police gave Cruz a piece of advice some might find counterintuitive. If she received more mystery messages, they said, she should respond, in an effort to get identifying information, according to her lawyer, Christopher L. Morano, the former Connecticut chief state’s attorney who now practices law in Essex.
ReplyDeleteThe messages from the unidentified phone resumed at 3:01 p.m. that day, and Cruz responded, following the playbook she had been given.
At 3:06 p.m., she received a message saying, “I miss u and want to see u.”
“When,” she replied a minute later.
“Can we talk about getting back together,” came the response at 3:09 p.m.
After some additional dialogue, she asked at 3:50 p.m., “Why nw paul? It has been months. Is it ur b day?”
“It has nothing to do w my bday,” said the reply at 4:13 p.m. “I am going to the cape w someone.”
After some additional dialogue, Cruz wrote at 4:27 p.m., “U asked why I did what I did? What ru talkin about.”
The response, a minute later, “Restrn order.”
Identity betrayed?
In applying for a Connecticut restraining order the next day in Vernon Superior Court, Cruz wrote that she had obtained only one previous restraining order in her life, “and it was against Paul Barkyoumb.” She also said his birthday is Sept. 11.
Her application was sufficient to convince a judge to issue a temporary restraining order. But a full, six-month order would require a hearing. In preparation for the hearing, Morano issued an urgent subpoena to Sprint Spectrum LP for records for the mystery cell number and for Barkyoumb’s own cell phone records.
He got a considerable amount of material, which is now in an evidence folder in Vernon Superior Court, along with aerial photographs showing the locations of cell towers the calls bounced off.
Morano was also able to locate the owner of the cell phone, Elizabeth Perez, who had bought it in late August at a shop in the Bronx, N.Y. She had been arrested during a Sept. 4 drug raid in Holyoke in which Barkyoumb participated.
Morano called Perez as a witness at the hearing, and he says she “positively identified” Barkyoumb as the officer who had taken her cell phone. When she identified him in court, she pointed to him, but a number of other people were in the area. So Morano asked that she leave the stand to make a clearer identification, and she walked over and pointed him out.
“Her testimony was dramatic,” the former chief state’s attorney said.
Barkyoumb subsequently testified that he might have been set up by other officers envious of his “meteoric rise” through police ranks, according to the Sunday Republican of Springfield, which covered the hearing.
But Morano said that Barkyoumb gave no names of jealous officers and cited no particular incidents.
Judge Elliot N. Solomon granted the six-month restraining order, saying in remarks from the bench that the conduct at issue was wrong. “People shouldn’t have to live in fear,” the Sunday Republican quoted the judge as saying.
The Springfield newspaper also quoted Solomon as saying that the use of evidence from an investigation for wrongful conduct is “absolutely corrupt.”
A Journal Inquirer reporter exchanged telephone messages with Barkyoumb’s lawyer, William H. Paetzold of Glastonbury, but failed to reach him Monday.
To Cruz, the moral of the story for other victims is that, in the face of frustration, they “continually have to advocate to get help.”
====
unome
Complaint against City of Holyoke and Paul Barkyoumb
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/106830635/Complaint-against-City-of-Holyoke-and-Paul-Barkyoumb
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS – WESTERN SECTION CIVIL ACTION NO.)MICHELLE CRUZ, )PLAINTIFF ))V. ) CIVIL COMPLAINT) JURY TRIAL DEMAND CITY OF HOLYOKE, HOLYOKE POLICE )DEPARTMENT, LIEUTENANT )DAVID PRATT, DETECTIVE PAUL )BARKYOUMB, DETECTIVE BRIAN DUKE, )DETECTIVE ANTHONY BRACH, )DEFENDANTS ))NATURE OF ACTION
1. Through this action, Plaintiff, Michelle Cruz (hereinafter "Ms. Cruz") seeks damages for personal injuries suffered as a result of the conduct of the Holyoke Police department. Plaintiff asserts federal and state civil rights claims against the Holyoke Police Department, Detective Paul Barkyoumb, Detective Brian Duke, Detective Anthony Brach, and Lieutenant David Pratt and their employer, the City of Holyoke,under the Massachusetts Tort Claim Act, Massachusetts General Law, chapter 258,section 4, and under 42 United States Code, section 1983
I am taking note of this; I believe I will have a very good case against them as well. I am calling an attorney today. Thank you for sharing. I pray more people take the actions Ms. Michelle Cruz has; she is a good example to all of us - bravely she fought for justice. Majority of Holyoke Police abuse their power and hurt people, the people they are paid to serve and protect. I am proud a woman stood up for herself, for justice, for all of us. I pray for Ms. Cruz's protection and a happy future.
ReplyDelete