Charges dropped against New Rochelle, NY man who claimed cop smuggled drugs

On Friday, drug charges were officially dropped against a New Rochelle man. His claim that a highly decorated police lieutenant planted the drugs was apparently confirmed by the officer's bodycam footage.

AIvin Harper, who now lives in Denver, attacked Lt. Sean Kane in brief remarks after Municipal Judge Eileen Songar McCarthy dismissed the case at the request of prosecutors, who are currently investigating the suspended lieutenant.

“I feel defeated. Before Officer Kane planted those drugs on me, I was a very optimistic, happy person. I'm just a shadow of myself. I can't sleep at night. This has destroyed me,” Harper told the judge. “What if I had never had that video? Who would have believed me?”

Ivin Harper, along with his attorney Sydney Stanley, makes a statement in court after drug charges against him were dismissed in New Rochelle Municipal Court on August 23, 2024. Harper claims that a New Rochelle police lieutenant planted the drugs.

Harper reported his Cadillac Escalade without permission to Mount Vernon police in the spring. But even though he got the SUV back, an alert was still active on the car, and that led New Rochelle police to approach the car on May 29 on Main Street in front of the Bracey Houses.

Harper claims Kane insisted on coming to the scene of the accident even though a dispatcher realized the alarm had been canceled.

Kane's bodycam footage shows him getting out of his police car and immediately running away from Harper. Kane pursues him through the lower parking lot, up the stairs, and then turns toward Harrison Street in the upper parking lot.

The search continued in the parking garage across the street from New Roc City. But a moment later, footage from Kane's body cam shows him driving with a small bag in his right hand. As he drives back up to the upper grounds of Bracey Houses, he presses the body cam and the sound turns on.

Kane may have thought he was turning on the video without knowing it was already playing.

He then gets out of his car, walks over to a minivan parked near the stairs between the properties, reaches under the front tire on the driver's side, and appears to be pulling something out.

As he gets back into the car, he radios that a drug charge is appropriate.

Harper left the area after the chase, but police kept his Cadillac. He returned and went to police headquarters on July 10, where he was arrested on charges of third- and fifth-degree illegal possession of a controlled substance. Police claimed crack and cocaine were found.

Officer Maria Vasquez's criminal complaint accuses Harper of throwing a plastic bag under a parked car and then Kane picking it up. In a separate report, she specifically wrote that Kane saw Harper throw the bag. However, body camera footage suggests that when Harper passed the minivan, Kane was still in the lower parking lot and could not have seen Harper throw anything.

A few days after his arrest and before the body camera footage was presented to his attorney, Harper filed a complaint with New Rochelle police alleging that the drugs had been planted. It is not clear when police officers viewed Kane's body camera video, including the foot chase and his subsequent discovery of the drugs.

It was only two weeks after Harper's complaint that Kane was suspended and the case was referred to the prosecutor's office, where the film footage was reviewed as a priority.

Police officials did not respond to an email seeking an update on the internal investigation. An attorney for Kane could not immediately be reached.

Because the case was still pending in local court, where a judge does not have final authority over crimes, Assistant District Attorney Craig Ascher on Friday first asked that the drug charge be reduced to a misdemeanor. He then asked that the charge be dismissed.

Before Harper testified in court, there was no concrete indication of what Kane had allegedly done.

Ascher said only that the dismissal was in the interests of justice. Lawyer Sydney Stanley of Legal Aid said there were “allegations of very serious police misconduct” that justified the dismissal.

“The right result was achieved, but there is still a real human cost,” Stanley told McCarthy. “It is not innocuous that there is a person standing to my left whose life was negatively affected by the prosecution… Even if this case is dismissed, the consequences cannot be dismissed or undone.”

Harper, a 45-year-old celebrity fitness coach and aspiring actor, starred in the first installment of the Amazon Prime film “Shadows” this year and had hoped to appear in the three subsequent installments. But he was dropped from those films after his arrest, he said.

“They fired me,” he told the judge. “I'm finished because in their eyes I'm a drug dealer.”

He said numerous previous complaints about Kane, who was named the city's Officer of the Year in 2011, have fallen on deaf ears over the years and he has instead been repeatedly promoted.

Normally, a dismissal would result in an immediate closure of the case, but Stanley asked the judge for a 90-day stay to assist with the ongoing investigation.

Harper claims he was targeted in part because he had a pending wrongful arrest charge stemming from a separate case last year, when he was charged with drug possession after a substance he claimed was protein powder tested positive for cocaine.

Prosecutors dropped the charges this year. Harper attributes this to chain of custody issues, as two days passed before the substance found in his car was inventoried and sent for testing.

Charges dropped against New Rochelle, NY man who claimed cop smuggled drugs

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