Ossining police Officer Emily Hirshowitz was getting harassing text messages in the spring of 2022 that she was sure were coming from colleagues. That’s what she reported to the Westchester District Attorney’s Office.
But when she turned over increasingly vile and threatening texts, the investigation revealed Hirshowitz had sent the new ones to herself.
Hirshowitz was arrested in 2023 and went on trial Friday, May 9, in Westchester County Court. Assistant District Attorney Renee Hassel told jurors the case was one of deception and that Hirshowitz had turned over altered records to obscure the phone numbers that had sent the texts.
“Under multiple layers of obfuscation…existed one person, Emily Hirshowitz,” Hassel said.
But defense lawyer Paul DerOhannesian assailed what he described as a shoddy investigation by DA investigators and suggested Hirshowitz had been framed by colleagues.
He said there were several opportunities for fellow officers to have access to Hirshowitz’s phone — including a 10-day period in June 2022 when her phone went missing at police headquarters — and that her password and log-in information were “well known in the department.”
Hirshowitz was arrested in June 2023 on felony charges of offering a false instrument for filing and misdemeanor charges of falsely reporting an incident. She faces up to four years in prison if convicted of any of the felonies.
Investigators determined that several of Hirshowitz’s screen captures had been altered
Wade Hardy, a retired White Plains police lieutenant who is chief deputy criminal investigator at the DA’s Office, testified Monday about his communication with Hirshowitz over the first few months of the investigation.
He led jurors through her initial complaint on May 4, 2022, in which she detailed harassment from 2017 to 2020 and said it had resumed in early 2022. She suspected one or more fellow Ossining officers were responsible. She followed up with emails in July and August in which she attached screen captures of additional texts she had received. In those, she was cursed at, told to kill herself, called derogatory names and threatened.
Hirshowitz wrote to Hardy on Aug. 12, 2022, days after the last screengrabs she sent, telling him she no longer wished to pursue the case if it meant her phone would be accessed. She claimed it was because private information in the phone would harm her more than any successful prosecution would help, especially if any culprit might only face a misdemeanor or violation.
Hardy testified that the investigation continued nonetheless, in part because the investigators had already subpoenaed phone records from multiple companies.
He also described Hirshowitz’s account to the village’s personnel officer of how her phone went missing in police headquarters in June 2022. She said she left it when she went to change, and when she came back it was gone. Despite what she described as an exhaustive search, she didn’t find it until 10 days later when it dropped out of the pocket of her police vest at headquarters. She was certain a colleague had taken it in an effort to access her phone.
On cross examination, Hardy repeatedly emphasized that he oversaw the investigation but didn’t conduct it. Over and over again, he told DerOhannesian that he could not recall whether details Hirshowitz provided about how her passwords could have been accessed, or what officers might have had access to her phone, were investigated.
Hassel said at the outset of the trial that the investigation found that several of the screen captures had been altered and a review of phone records determined the texts had come from phone numbers belonging to Hirshowitz.
The investigation found that some of the original texts Hirshowitz received had been sent from an Ossining police officer, Louis Rinaldi, who resigned in May 2022 over unrelated disciplinary matters. Rinaldi hated then-Chief Kevin Sylvester, who was close with Hirshowitz.
Criminal complaint did not identity former Ossining cop who texted Hirshowitz
When Hirshowitz was arrested, the criminal complaint did not identify Rinaldi but said that the sender of two of the texts that were investigated could not be prosecuted.
The day after Hirshowitz made her complaint to prosecutors, she told Rinaldi to stop texting her and he did.
DeOhannesian said Hirshowitz had been chastised by her superiors for lax protection of her log-in information, suggesting that could have allowed others to make harassing texts appear to come from her phone numbers.
He repeatedly pointed out that none of the criminal charges relate to his client’s initial complaint to investigators and that she had, in fact, been subjected to harassment.
“Those messages are real,” he told the jury. “They were sent to her by someone else. That’s what she believed. And it’s true.”
Hirshowitz, 38, has remained on administrative leave with pay since shortly before her arrest. She joined the Ossining Police Department in 2016 after a two-year stint as a New Rochelle police officer.
The trial before Westchester Judge Anne Bianchi resumes Wednesday, May 14.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Ossining cop said she got threatening text messages, but now on trial over sending them
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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