This story, by Aaron Calvin, was first published by the Stowe Reporter on Aug. 3.
A superior circuit court judge in Hyde Park has forced the town of Stowe to release documents that revealed a Stowe cop was forced out of his job for lying about a traffic stop in December.
The ruling forced Stowe officials to release previously withheld documents detailing the February departure of former Stowe police officer Ben Cavarretta following a driving under the influence arrest he made in Montpelier, and an investigative memo written by Stowe Police Chief Donald Hull alleging Cavarretta did not tell the truth about key details surrounding the incident.
In a Jan. 31 memo recommending Cavarretta’s termination to Stowe town manager Charles Safford, Hull alleged that Cavarretta was “untruthful” in his reporting of events related to a Dec. 5 traffic stop.
“The integrity, conduct and truthfulness is the backbone of the ethical police profession and that of any police officer,” Hull wrote Jan. 19 in an internal police document. “Police officers have an obligation to hold him/herself to the highest ethical standard possible. If this is not done, it undermines the confidence and trust of fellow officers and the citizens we serve. Being untruthful, no matter how inconsequential, has a negative and lasting impact on the officer. All of which cannot be overlooked.”
Hull also indicated that Cavarretta had been “counseled several times” on his demeanor and actions during traffic stops and had received disciplinary action in the past.
In a Feb. 13 letter Safford notified Cavarretta that his employment as a police officer with the town of Stowe was over.
When reached for comment, Cavarretta said that he wasn’t fired but had quit, though documents provided to the Stowe Reporter by the town of Stowe indicate he was terminated. Cavarretta said that a severance agreement with the town forbid him from speaking further on the matter, though he did accuse the Stowe Reporter of “publishing the wrong facts” in previous reporting.
Safford said he could not address the severance contract but acknowledged that “at the end of the day (Cavarretta’s) employment ended as a resignation.”
The memo and other documents had been initially withheld by the town after the newspaper’s public records request. The town contended that Vermont’s public records law prevented it from making public any documents submitted to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council during an internal investigation.
A judge’s ruling last month in a lawsuit between the town and the newspaper clarified that the town was not able to exempt the records.
Traffic stop
On Dec. 5, Cavarretta was headed home from conducting training at the Vermont Police Academy in Montpelier when he pulled over Theodore K. Garrison, 58, of Barre, on Route 2 in East Montpelier at 5:58 p.m.
Garrison had an established criminal record in the Montpelier-Barre-Berlin region that Cavarretta patrolled before coming to Stowe.
According to an affidavit filed by Cavarretta, he said he observed Garrison’s black Chevrolet Cruze having trouble maintaining its lane and “almost struck a guardrail” in heavy traffic. After being pulled over, Garrison claimed he was simply “trying to light a cigarette” and admitted to having a couple beers.
Cavarretta made Garrison submit to several sobriety tests, but not a breathalyzer test, and claimed Garrison failed them all before placing him under arrest for what would have been his third driving under the influence charge and for driving with a suspended license.
Though outside of his coverage area of Stowe, Cavarretta declined to call the Vermont State Police to handle the incident and later gave conflicting accounts as to why he chose to handle the incident. Vermont State Trooper Crista Maurice, who arrived on scene while Cavarretta was submitting Garrison to sobriety tests, merely verified that the others present in Garrison’s car were legally allowed to drive the car away, according to her report.
Cavarretta also didn’t immediately notify any superior officer at the Stowe Police Department that he was making the traffic stop. Cpl. Christopher Rogers found out it was occurring when Lamoille County dispatch reached out to him.
In a text message sent from his personal phone, Cavarretta later told Rogers that he had to stop the vehicle because the “guy hit a guardrail and was all over the road” and that “he had no choice,” according to Rogers’ recounting of the evening, which was included as part of Hull’s investigation.
Cavarretta seemed to anticipate that Hull would be unhappy about his extraterritorial traffic stop even before his truthfulness around the case came into question. He also texted the Stowe Police Department’s Det. Lt. Fred Whitcomb that evening and wrote, “On a scale of 0-100 how mad with Chief be over this and should I just sign a write up now.”
“Well he is out rodeoing so what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Whitcomb replied and Cavarretta reiterated that he “had no choice” in making the arrest.
The next day, when Cavarretta came into the police station to finish paperwork around the arrest, Rogers recounted that he said again that Garrison was involved in a crash, which forced Cavarretta to act in a “public care taking capacity.”
Former Stowe Police Department Sgt. James Sawyer later approached Rogers that evening and told him, “We have a problem.”
Sawyer reviewed the body camera footage from Cavarretta’s stop in Montpelier and found there was no mention of a crash into a guardrail, as his colleague claimed. When both Rogers and Sawyer reviewed the footage, they noticed several “officer safety issues” but were most concerned with the lack of any mention of a crash.
Sawyer left the Stowe Police Department in January — a month following Cavarretta’s problematic traffic stop — to take a job as a patrol officer at the Morristown Police Department.
Cavarretta also claimed that Vermont State Police refused to handle the case, but Rogers and Sawyer found when reviewing the footage of the stop that Cavarretta also lied about that. Cavarretta told state police that he only needed backup and insisted on handling the stop himself.
On Dec. 10, Cavarretta also asked Rogers to adjust his timesheet to reflect that he had been “out sick” for the two shifts following the Garrison incident but told him not to record the overtime hours he put in while making the arrest and that Whitcomb had approved hiding it from Hull.
In his memo calling for Cavarretta’s termination, Hull accused Cavarretta of lying about Whitcomb approving his request not to record the hours during his arrest of Garrison, saying that Whitcomb gave no such approval.
On Dec. 12, Hull notified Cavarretta he had opened an investigation into his conduct after learning of the disparities between what he claimed happened and what his body camera recorded during the Montpelier traffic stop.
On Jan. 19, Hull completed the investigation and recommended Cavarretta be terminated.
“Your inconsistent statements about why you pulled the car over and began the traffic stop go to the heart of the probable cause needed for the stop itself,” Hull wrote in the Jan. 31 memo notifying Cavarretta that he had violated the law enforcement code of conduct, among other infractions.
“You told different things to different people about why you pulled the car over in the first place, and those inconsistencies undermine your credibility and call your truthfulness into question. Further, you were untruthful about your interactions with the state police, indicating that they had essentially refused to take over the traffic stop, and that is why you stayed to handle it. This is not true according to a number of other witnesses,” Hull wrote.
The charges against Garrison were rescinded and any record of the arrest, including the affidavit filed by Cavarretta, were removed from court records.
On April 7, after reviewing the contents of Hull’s internal investigation into Cavarretta concerning the traffic stop in Montpelier, Lamoille County State’s Attorney Todd Shove issued a Giglio letter, also known as a Brady letter, regarding the former Stowe officer. A Giglio letter is issued when an officer’s conduct is called into question. By issuing the letter, Shove marked Cavarretta as an unreliable witness in a court of law.
The Stowe Police Department submitted Hull’s internal investigation memo and its supporting material to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, which has yet to decide whether to decertify Cavarretta as a police officer.
History of ‘bravado’
Cavarretta, 36, made a career in law enforcement as an enthusiastic expert in identifying and arresting drivers under the influence in his decade-plus experience as a police officer, with stints at the Oakland Police Department in Maine, the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department, the Hardwick Police Department and, most recently, the Berlin Police Department before coming to Stowe in 2019. He boasted a variety of certifications that made him an expert witness when it came to intoxicated driving.
As Hull noted in his memo recommending Cavarretta’s termination, however, the Dec. 5 traffic stop in Montpelier was not the first where the officer received counseling and disciplinary action, though it’s unclear what occurred in the other incidents or how many instances there were.
When asked to clarify Cavarretta’s disciplinary history, Safford merely said that the “dismissal of Cavarretta based on ‘untruthfulness’ stood on its own regardless of whatever more minor disciplinary actions he received.”
In a heavily redacted document obtained by the Stowe Reporter, an unnamed colleague of Cavarretta’s submitted their employee comments for a Stowe Police Department counseling session held on July 27, 2022. These comments were considered by the officer to be a “form of rebuttal and self-advocacy” and not meant to be a “pissing match.”
The officer said that Cavarretta “often totes ‘Tombstone Courage’ and bravado in the squad room and speaks of the good old days working solo.” The officer noted that Cavarretta had previously commanded a colleague to leave the scene as he made an arrest in a driving under the influence incident.
Cavarretta’s career also got off to an inauspicious start. Though not mentioned to the public during his time patrolling Stowe, Cavarretta got his start as a police officer when he signed on to be a reserve with the department in Oakland, Maine, where he worked from 2007 through 2009, a representative for the department confirmed.
He started that job on disciplinary probation after he was reprimanded by the Maine Criminal Justice Academy’s board of trustees after he revealed in a pre-employment polygraph test that he was guilty of “reckless conduct with a firearm.”
Safford said he had not been aware of this incident prior to hiring Cavarretta as a Stowe police officer.
Another incident occurred on Nov. 2, 2022, about a month before the Garrison stop that ultimately ended his employment with Stowe police. Cavarretta pulled over Perry Mason, 54, of Colchester, and ultimately charged him with driving under the influence.
Mason’s lawyer made a motion for the court to dismiss the case after Cavarretta’s body camera footage revealed he had aggressively interrogated Mason and his companion before calling in a K-9 unit to conduct a lengthy search of the vehicle for drugs, which turned up nothing.
Shove dismissed the Mason case on March 15, just a few weeks after the Stowe Reporter reported on the case and broke the news that he was contemplating issuing a Giglio letter regarding Cavarretta’s conduct.
Shove did not respond to a request for comment on the dismissal.
