D’Amelio Out on $75,000 Bail
Joseph D’Amelio, the MIT Police Officer arrested for drug trafficking on Sat., March 14, has been released on $75,000 bail. He is under house arrest with electronic monitoring, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s spokesman Jake Wark.
D’Amelio’s attorney, Kimberly Foster, maintains his innocence.
His bail was reduced from $500,000 to $75,000 at a bail reduction hearing on Monday.
D’Amelio was previously arraigned in Sept. 2006 in Malden District Court, and the charge was disposed of in a bench trial in Jan. 2007, according to Middlesex DA spokeswoman Jessica Venezia.
According to court documents obtained by The Tech, D’Amelio was accused of threatening a pawn shop owner. According to the shop owner’s complaint, D’Amelio was attempting to obtain property stolen from him. D’Amelio and an unidentified friend drove to the pawn shop in a hearse, and D’Amelio allegedly told the owner to return his property or “I will beat you with a fucking bat and get you into the back of the hearse.”
A police officer’s report claims that a retired Boston Police Detective witnessed the threats. The narrative section of that report indicates that MIT was performing an internal investigation of the incident, and D’Amelio’s defense witness list included two MIT officers (though it is not clear if they were called to testify).
MIT spokeswoman Patti Richards declined to comment on whether MIT was aware of D’Amelio’s past run-in with the law, but reiterated that MIT takes his recent arrest “very seriously” and that the review panel will “consider D’Amelio’s employment history.”
Nick Semenkovich contributed to the reporting of this article.