I-Team: State Police Investigate How Man Was Wrongly Accused
BOSTON (CBS) - Imagine being charged with a crime you know you did not commit and then spending thousands of dollars to defend yourself.
The I-Team found that's exactly happened to one man and now the Massachusetts State Police are trying to figure out what they did wrong in their investigation.
Mark Gindlesperger looks like a guilty man. Exhibit A is the State Police report.
"It said that I side-swiped someone going down Route 128 and totally destroyed the driver's side of his car and I took off and he tried to chase me down," said Gindlesperger.
Jesse Correia, the driver of the other car, says that's exactly what happened.
"I met the State Police officer there," Correia said. "I gave him all the information, the license plate number and the color of the truck and everything."
Any chance he got the wrong truck? "Ah, no. No. Absolutely not," he said.
But here's the catch -- Gindlesperger swears it wasn't him.
In fact, the New Hampshire resident says he didn't even know about it until three months later when he received a notice ordering him to appear in Gloucester District Court to answer charges of leaving the scene of property damage and negligent operation of a motor vehicle.
"The first I ever heard of this was when I got the summons on January 27," said Gindlesperger. "And I had to be in court six days later." He said he had "nothing to do with" the accident. "I was actually at work at the time."
And Gindlesperger has evidence to support that. His employee swipe card history has him just leaving work when the alleged accident occurred.
And a letter from an insurance appraiser found "no damage consistent with the accident" to his pick-up truck and "no evidence of recent repairs."
Despite that, Gindlesperger spent six months and $7,000 fighting what he says were completely bogus charges.
"It was very hard for me to believe that all this was happening," he said.
What's most hard to believe is what the State Police did not do to investigate the alleged accident on Route 128 in Gloucester. And now those missteps are themselves the subject of an internal State Police investigation prompted by the I-Team.
For starters, the State Police never examined Gindlesperger's truck to verify it had been involved in the crash.
"If they had located me within a day or two of the accident I would have gladly drove somewhere to meet them, showed them my truck, explained everything to them, and that would have been the end of that," he said.
Gindlesperger also never received a traffic citation, because the State Police apparently mailed it to an address in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire, where Gindlesperger lives.
After the I-Team started asking questions, the State Police began an internal investigation into how that happened and "whether there were additional investigative steps that should have been taken," according to a statement from State Police spokesman David Procopio.
The I-Team was curious why Correia never showed up in court.
"I didn't go to court because I didn't think I had to," he said. "I figured the courts would take care of him."
And why he never filed an insurance claim to pay for the damage to his car. "I had so many things going on at the time where it really wasn't that big of a deal," Correia said.
But it was a very big deal to Gindlesperger.
"The way I felt the whole time was that I was considered guilty and I was there having to prove I was innocent because there was no one on the other side saying that you actually did this," he said.
All charges against Mark Gindlesperger were eventually dismissed, because his attorney successfully argued the State Police failed to notify him in a timely manner.
The court found the State Police had violated the state's "no-fix" law, which is designed to prevent the manipulation and misuse of traffic citations.
But Gindlesperger insisted the charges were wrong from the start and the case never should have gotten this far.
