An “unhinged” South Florida police officer who was fired following a viral video showing her holding an unarmed man at gunpoint will be reinstated, proving once again just how difficult it is to terminate cops who abuse their authority.
But Bethany Guerriero is still facing a federal lawsuit over the incident, which was described by her own superiors as “an absolute abuse of authority in every possible way,” according to the Palm Beach Post. The jury trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 9.
“She’s not stable,” said Robert Norton, the attorney who represented the city during the hearing, according to the Palm Beach Post, which quoted from the transcript of the arbitration hearing that took place earlier this month.
“She cannot run around with the authority of a law enforcement officer — which is enormous, and we want it to be enormous. She can’t do that. She cannot be a law enforcement officer in this city.”
But Guerriero’s attorney, Rick King, told the arbitrator that her behavior that day merited a discipline “someplace between a stern look and this termination.” And the arbitrator, Richard Miller, apparently agreed because he sided with Guerriero, a 19-year veteran of the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department.
Guerriero, who was making more than $100,000 a year before she was fired in September 2023, will likely receive about that much in back pay, but Palm Beach Gardens Police Maj. Javier Garcia declined to elaborate when emailed by Atlanta Black Star because “It is our policy that we do not comment on pending litigation or personnel matters.”
But she will likely endure scrutiny from some of her fellow officers including one sergeant who investigated the incident and said she was “prone to becoming enraged and has a history of emotional tantrums.”
“I’ll admit all day long that that wasn’t my best moment at all,” Guerriero acknowledged in a deposition last year.
The Arrest
The incident took place on May 9, 2023, at an apartment complex following a confrontation between a man named Ryan Gould and a married couple at the community pool.
Gould said he was swimming laps just after 11 a.m. when the wife entered the pool area and asked him to stop so she could swim laps in a perpendicular direction on a shorter end of the pool.
Gould refused to leave the pool, which was otherwise void of people, and continued swimming his laps. The woman started swimming her laps, resulting in the two swimming into each other’s path.
Surveillance video contains no audio but shows the two arguing before the woman steps out of the pool to call her husband, Benedetto Salvia, who then walks into the pool area to argue with Gould.
The video shows Salvia walking up to Gould and standing directly in front of him, lifting his shirt to reveal a gun in a holster tucked in his waistband, which was when Gould left the pool area to call police about a man brandishing a gun.
But Salvia was the first to call the police, accusing Gould of harassing his wife, telling dispatchers he displayed a gun and that he has a concealed weapons permit.
Palm Beach Gardens Officer Michael Valerio was the first cop to arrive on the scene, confronting Gould, who was standing outside the pool clubhouse, asking him if he was the one with the gun.
“I don’t have it; he does,” responded Gould, prompting the officer to walk around the clubhouse to the pool to confiscate Salvia’s gun without having to draw his own gun.
Guerriero then pulled up to the scene with Palm Beach Gardens Officer Joseph Strzelecki and took a completely different approach.
“Keep your hands out of your pocket for me,” she said after stepping out of her patrol car, according to the video from her body camera.
“I’m not the one with the gun,” Gould responded while reaching into his pocket and pulling out a phone, which angered the cop.
“Keep your hand out of your pocket,” she responded, the tone of her voice escalating. “Put the phone down.”
She then pulls out her gun and orders him to lie facedown on the ground while Strzelecki – who is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit – pulls out his Taser.
“Can someone tell me why I am in handcuffs,” Gould asks as more cops arrive.
But Guerriero was unable to follow through with the arrest — the charge became resisting arrest without violence — because she started complaining about chest pains and was rushed to the hospital for what she describes in the deposition as a “cardiac incident,” remaining hospitalized for two days.
The Unarrest
Police transported Gould to the station dressed only in shorts, placing him in a cell. Meanwhile, a sergeant viewing the surveillance video from the apartment complex determined that Gould was indeed the victim and not the aggressor.
Palm Beach Gardens Police Sgt. Dennis Beath then ordered Gould to be “unarrested” before driving to the hospital to inform Guerriero that her actions would likely lead to disciplinary action. When she asked the sergeant who made the decision to release Gould, he said it was his decision.
“That decision was made when I watched the surveillance footage of Gould,” he responded. “Everything he said to Valerio was 100 percent true about the incident that took place at the pool.”
But it wasn’t until a month later when the YouTube police accountability channel Lackluster published an explanatory video titled “Innocent Man Locked Up By Unhinged Cop – Chief Escalates” – which has been viewed more than one million times and has received more than 24,000 comments as of this writing – that the agency began taking steps to fire her.
“What’s scary is she’s been a cop for 19 years,” said one of the commenters with the username BobDuato. “Imagine the stuff she’s lied about for that long.”
