WORCESTER, MA – A man whom Worcester police continued to pursue with murder charges despite DNA excluding him as a possible suspect has turned around and sued those police officers in federal court this morning for faking evidence in an attempt to frame him.
Dana Gaul, 43, father of four and nearly life-long resident of the Worcester area was wrongfully arrested and jailed five months for the November 24, 2020 murder of Jehlon Rose. As today’s suit notes, another man admitted to being the man in the fight with Mr. Rose and matched the description given by witnesses to the murder.
Today’s lawsuit comes in the wake of at least nine others [pp. 12-14] where Worcester police have been credibly accused of falsifying witness identifications and other evidence so as to secure wrongful convictions.
City of Worcester police officers Joseph A. Albano, Elisa Baez, Dan Heavey, Sean Lovely and Tim Foley stand accused of fabricating the identification evidence choosing “to take an easy route to ‘solve’ the case by fabricating evidence against [Mr. Gaul].” The police defendants allegedly falsified identifications of Mr. Gaul by using grainy photos from surveillance video to coerce third parties into saying that those grainy images looked like Mr. Gaul.
None of the fabricated identifications of Mr. Gaul came from witnesses to the murder itself, according to the lawsuit. In fact, the physical descriptions of the murderer given by the witnesses to the murderer did not match Mr. Gaul at all.
Mr. Gaul did not know Mr. Rose and was nowhere near the scene of the murder. In fact, when he was arrested, police knew that DNA evidence excluded Mr. Gaul as the murderer according to the lawsuit. The man who murdered Mr. Rose had fought with him and the two were on top of each other as they fought. The murderer’s DNA was on Mr. Rose’s body and clothes. The murderer’s DNA was compared to Mr. Gaul’s DNA, which excluded him as the source.
In addition to losing five months of his life in jail away from his three children and fiancé, Mr. Gaul had to live with the possibility of losing his freedom for the rest of his life for a crime he had no part of. Police further harmed Mr. Gaul by publicly identifying him as a murderer.
Mr. Gaul is represented by Debra Loevy and Mark Reyes of Loevy & Loevy Attorneys at Law.
Loevy & Loevy is one of the nation’s largest civil rights law firms and has won more multi-million-dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country.
A copy of the suit, Dana Gaul v. City of Worcester, Joseph A. Albano, Elisa Baez, Dan Heavey, Sean Lovely, Tim Foley , Case No. 4:22-cv-40043, can be found here.