It is exceedingly rare for disputes between police departments and local prosecutors to erupt in open court. But that is just what happened in a Brighton courtroom last month.
Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight said her prosecution of an assault case stemming from a pro-Palestinian protest at Harvard would have to be delayed, yet again, because the university’s police department was refusing to finish an investigation.
“The Commonwealth’s in this position,” she alleged, “only because Harvard has not done their job.”
It was just the latest strange turn in a case that has been full of them. The alleged assault occurred at a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Harvard Business School last October when protesters surrounded a Jewish Israeli student, Yoav Segev, and yelled at him to leave the premises. There was bumping and shoving. Videos of the incident spread online and became a flashpoint in the turmoil that consumed Harvard after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year.
In May, two pro-Palestinian Harvard graduate students, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo and Ibrahim Bharmal, were charged with assault and battery and a civil rights violation — essentially a hate crime — for their role in the confrontation.
The case has now drawn Harvard and Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden, whose office is responsible for prosecuting the case, into an extraordinary public dispute.
Harvard, through its campus police force, originally investigated the case and brought the criminal charges. But Hayden’s office alleged in court last month and in statements to the Globe that Harvard had refused to turn over essential information, including the names of witnesses and other possible suspects.
Harvard said that was nonsense. The school has “cooperated fully,” Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesperson, said. “It remains unclear what further role they are asking [the Harvard police] to play.”
Congressional Republicans entered the fray as well. In a scathing letter on Sept. 18, US Representatives Virginia Foxx and Elise Stefanik — whose grilling of then-Harvard president Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism last year contributed to Gay’s resignation — accused current Harvard president Alan Garber of obstructing the pursuit of justice by not cooperating with Hayden’s office.
“Harvard is shielding those who physically assaulted a Jewish student on Harvard’s campus by preventing a state prosecutor from moving forward with the state’s investigation,” they wrote.
On Saturday, in response to questions from the Globe, Tina Nguyen, a spokesperson for Hayden’s office, said the Harvard police department is “assigned and investigating.” Newton, the Harvard spokesperson, said the university “has continued to cooperate in the investigation.” The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday and the prosecution is expected to be postponed once again, Nguyen said, “by agreement of all parties.”
The two accused students, Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal, maintain their innocence and believe the case has been influenced by politics. US Senator Mitt Romney and other Harvard alumni cited the alleged assault in an open letter to Harvard leaders last year that questioned the university’s commitment to creating a safe environment for Jewish students, and congressional Republicans made it a focal point of an investigation into Harvard.
It is “a highly politicized situation,” said Leonard Kesten, a lawyer who has represented police departments in Massachusetts civil rights cases. “There’s nothing typical about this case and the situation law enforcement found themselves in.”
It is also unusual, he and other legal experts said, for a misdemeanor assault and battery case such as this one to linger in the courts for so long.
The facts of the case were publicly debated in media reports and online for months before the criminal charges were filed. For some, the confrontation was a clear instance of violent antisemitism and part of an emerging pattern of animus toward Jewish and Israeli students amid the Israel-Hamas war. Others saw the incident as a minor tussle that was recast, in response to political pressure, as a criminal attack.
The confrontation occurred at a tumultuous time. Eleven days earlier, on Oct. 7, Hamas militants and their collaborators stormed into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, which has now killed more than 42,000 people, began shortly afterward, and prompted large protests on Harvard’s campus.
Segev, the Jewish Israeli student, had relatives in Kibbutz Nirim, one of the villages where terrorists burned down homes and took civilians hostage on Oct. 7. His wife’s cousin guarded the door of his family’s bomb shelter for eight hours holding a kitchen knife, Segev told Harvard Business School classmates in a video-recorded talk.
By the time of the Oct. 18 protest at Harvard Business School, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza had killed hundreds of people, including women and children, and reduced some residential areas to rubble. Meanwhile, at Harvard, pro-Palestinian student activists had their personal information published online, received threats, and lost job offers.
When Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal saw Segev walking among the protesters and recording, they feared he intended to use the video to publicly identify them. (There is no evidence Segev did this.) That’s why they approached him, they said in interviews with the Globe. They and other protesters formed a scrum around Segev and moved him away from the demonstration.
In court filings, the Harvard police said Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo committed assault and battery by “interfering with [Segev’s] movement,” shouting the word “shame” at him, “appearing to make contact with [Segev] on more than one occasion,” and by “placing a keffiyeh” — a type of scarf — “on top of [Segev’s] head.” The Harvard police also accused them of targeting Segev based on his Jewish identity.
Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo said in an interview that any contact between themselves and Segev was unintentional and they did not know he was Jewish. An attorney for Segev declined to comment.
Hayden’s office said it wants the Harvard police to identify more of the people who surrounded Segev.
Thomas Nolan, a former lieutenant in the Boston Police Department, said he found it unusual that a hate crime case was carried forward by the Harvard University Police Department. Typically, such a case would be handled by the Boston Police Department’s civil rights unit, which has “specially trained detectives who make these kinds of sensitive determinations as to whether in fact violations of civil rights have occurred,” he said.
Instead, a single officer with the Harvard police department, Sergeant Thomas Karns, largely conducted the investigation and then went to court in Brighton to pursue criminal charges.
Since then, Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal have raised concerns about Karns’s background. He was once accused of calling a Black colleague the N-word and a homophobic slur, according to reports in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. Karns denied using the N-word. Tettey-Tamaklo is Black and gay; Bharmal is of South Asian descent.
Karns was also once accused by the American Civil Liberties Union of surveilling pro-Palestinian activists. He was spotted, in 2008, photographing demonstrators in Harvard Square and later explained in a police report that he had been engaged in “intelligence gathering,” according to the ACLU.
Harvard declined to answer questions about Karns or make him available for an interview.
In their letter accusing Harvard of obstructing the prosecution, Foxx and Stefanik asserted the university is now “sidelining the lead Harvard University police officer who initially brought the case to the District Attorney’s Office.”
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.