The incident at the center of a police brutality lawsuit that already has cost the City of Ocean City's insurer hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees apparently was filmed by the accuser's own home surveillance system.
West Atlantic Boulevard resident Monica Raab claims in a complaint filed in 2011 that she was permanently injured by an Ocean City patrolman, Jesse Scott Ruch, who was trying to handcuff her for no reasonable cause following a confrontation over a garden trailer.
Ruch had started to write a ticket for the illegally parked trailer in May 2010 outside Raab's home.
In a pair of wildly different and sensational accounts, Raab claims that Ruch violently grabbed her arm, pushed her to the ground and repeatedly hit her head on the pavement. But Ruch claimed that Raab used the trailer like a battering ram to attack him, became irrational and at one point walked topless across her yard to return to her house.
Raab, who was 51 at the time of the incident, is married to a family physician with an Ocean City practice, Gary Raab, who is part of the Raab Family LLC, which owns some of the most valuable properties on the Ocean City Boardwalk. She was never charged with any criminal offense.
Ruch's lawyer, John J. Bannan, is using the home surveillance as evidence in a request for U.S. District Court Judge Robert Kugler to dismiss Raab's claims against the officer.
"A videotape capturing the events in question that quite clearly contradicts the version of the story told by the plaintiff permits a court to conclude that no reasonable jury could believe the plaintiff's discredited account," Bannan writes in a court document arguing for summary judgment.
But the opposing lawyer's interpretation of the video is different.
In his reply to the motion for summary judgment, Paul R. Rizzo writes that Ruch's contention that the video surveillance supports his story is "ridiculous and misleading."
"Not only were these photographs never produced by defendants during discovery, but due to the quality of the pictures, no reasonable person viewing them could conclude that they show plaintiff hitting Officer Ruch with the trailer," Rizzo writes. "The photographs simply do not support that conclusion at all."
Still images taken from the home surveillance video are part of the court record, and they seem to support Rizzo's claim that the quality makes it hard to determine exactly what happened. The stills are released in a sequence and appear to show Raab moving the trailer with Ruch on the opposite side. They also appear to show Raab walking without her shirt on. In the grainy shots, court markings obscure her upper body.
The full video has not yet been entered as a court record.
The written arguments for and against summary judgment were due June 16, and the lawyers await Kugler's decision.
Regardless of the case's outcome, the small-town dispute over a garden trailer has led to some big-time legal bills.
By March, the city’s insurer had made 10 payments totaling $187,319.74 to one law firm (Barker, Scott, Gelfand and James of Linwood) to defend the city and another three payments totaling $14,417.87 to a different firm (Reynolds and Horn of Marlton) to defend the police officer as an individual, according to invoices provided by the Atlantic County Municipal Joint Insurance Fund (JIF).
The city has offered settlements to end a number other high-profile lawsuits, but Raab appears determined to fight the case to the end. The legal fees will continue to mount if the case heads toward a trial.
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