A Hartford police officer is the subject of an internal affairs investigation after a police report said he met with a teenage girl, with whom he’d been intimately involved, late last month while on duty and a short confrontation ensued.
A witness reported the early-morning July 29 incident to Bloomfield police, who investigated whether the two had a physical altercation outside a church on Tower Avenue. Police ultimately closed the case without pursuing any charges, Bloomfield police said Tuesday.
But Hartford police have since opened a “parallel” internal investigation into Officer Joven Gonzalez stemming from the incident that night, Lt. Paul Cicero said Tuesday afternoon.
Gonzalez has been reassigned to the department’s booking division while the investigation continues, but the department would not release further details, Cicero said.
Attempts to reach Gonzalez and a representative of the police officers’ union were unsuccessful late Tuesday afternoon.
The incident followed a short “intimate and sexual relationship” between Gonzalez, 26, and the girl, who is under the age of 18, who met after Gonzalez arrested her for larceny in April, according to Bloomfield police reports. The age of legal consent in Connecticut is 16 years old.
Gonzalez later found out she is a juvenile while helping her apply for a job and told Bloomfield investigators she had lied to him about her age, according to the police reports.
He then broke off the relationship and it devolved, including the girl threatening to come to his home or even kill his wife, Gonzalez told Bloomfield police.
The confrontation on July 29 began when Gonzalez and the girl arranged to meet at about 2 a.m. in a church parking lot on Tower Avenue while he was on duty, the police report said. She met him in his personal car, which she was given the key to and retrieved from the Hartford Police Department parking lot, the report indicates.
Gonzalez and the girl both offered differing accounts of what happened next: Gonzalez said that she took his personal cellphone and maced him when he tried to retrieve it, but the girl said it was Gonzalez who became upset and took a phone away from her and punched her twice, according to the police report. She said she was not injured and that Gonzalez tried to stop her from leaving the area, but she ultimately would not provide a full statement to Bloomfield police, the report said.
A witness to the incident told Bloomfield police they saw Gonzalez holding the girl’s hands and heard her saying, “Let go of me” and “Get off of me,” according to the report. The girl told the witness to report the incident to police and the witness said the girl did not appear to be injured or in any pain, the report said.
Bloomfield police also reviewed a series of text messages between the girl and one of her friends, who is not identified in the report, from about an hour after the incident, according to the police report. Bloomfield police also reviewed security camera footage from two nearby churches that show the Hartford police cruiser and what appears to be Gonzalez’s car sitting next to each other for about 30 minutes early that morning, but does not capture a physical confrontation, the police reports said.
Hartford police did not indicate Tuesday when the internal investigation would be complete.
Zach Murdock can be reached at zmurdock@courant.com.
