The criminal investigation into whether former Canaan cop-turned-state trooper Sam Provenza tampered with evidence crucial to a now-infamous 2017 traffic stop wrapped up more than two years ago.
But since the investigation’s findings only became public last month, I figured it was worth asking Grafton County Attorney Marcie Hornick if the report had legs.
After I broached the subject in an email on Thursday, Hornick messaged back that based on her review of the report, Provenza wouldn’t face any criminal charges.
“I will not bring charges if I do not believe I can meet the elements of a criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt,” she told me.
Fair enough.
But I’m not sure Provenza and, by extension, the Canaan Police Department are off the hook in the court of public opinion — at least outside the law-and-order crowd.
The fact that an investigation was even launched and that its findings eventually became public signals progress in the fight for greater police accountability and transparency in New Hampshire.
In a case I’ve been writing about for a few years, Canaan resident Crystal Eastman has accused Provenza of assaulting her when she didn’t hand over her driver’s license and registration as fast as he would have liked during a Nov. 30, 2017, traffic stop.
Eastman, who was in her early 30s at the time, left the roadside encounter that afternoon in an ambulance. She was taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center with a severe knee injury that has required two surgeries and forced her to give up her job as a heavy equipment operator with the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.
Provenza has denied using excessive force while arresting Eastman, who was charged with two misdemeanors. A Lebanon Circuit Court judge acquitted her of resisting arrest but found her guilty of disobeying an officer.
In 2020, Eastman, who now goes by her married last name of Wright, filed a federal civil suit against the town, claiming Provenza’s “unlawful conduct” has caused her to “suffer lasting physical and non-physical injuries.”
Eastman and her lawyers allege there was a video of the encounter. Provenza and Canaan officials, however, have maintained that the dashboard camera in his cruiser had malfunctioned that day, resulting in no video.
But now the plot thickens.
It only recently became public that the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office asked the Grafton County Sheriff’s Department in February 2019 to conduct a criminal investigation into whether Provenza had “purposely deleted an in-car camera video” of his encounter with Eastman.
A call from a retired Canaan police officer to the AG’s Office prompted the investigation. A current Canaan officer told the retired cop that “Provenza had lied about the video not working,” according to the report.
Over a two-month period in early 2019, investigators interviewed nearly a dozen people. Wayne Fortier, a retired New Hampshire State Police detective who was brought in to head the sheriff department’s investigation, shared the findings with Hornick, the county’s elected prosecutor. Hornick told me that she reviewed the report with Fortier before making her decision not to prosecute. (Fortier died Dec. 8 at age 74.)
After I made a request under the state’s right-to-know law in early January, the sheriff’s department released the lengthy report to the Valley News. (InDepthNH.org had requested the same information earlier, and the nonprofit news website’s Damien Fisher wrote about the report in late December.)
Some of the more interesting — and alarming — information in the report came from investigators’ interviews with representatives of Twin Bridge Services, a Washington, N.H., IT service provider that installed and maintains the cruiser video camera system used by Canaan police.
The day after Provenza’s encounter with Eastman, Canaan Town Administrator Mike Samson asked Twin Bridge owner Allan Treadwell to examine’s Provenza’s in-car camera to “determine why it was not working properly.”
Treadwell’s son, Aaron, was sent to Canaan to inspect the equipment. “After a review of the technical data, it appeared that the camera had been non-functional (on the day in question) because it, simply, had never been turned on,” Allan Treadwell told investigators.
“Provenza’s camera was unique in that it was the only camera in the fleet that required the officer to manually power up the camera,” Treadwell explained. Cameras in Canaan’s other four cruisers automatically “power up” when the ignition key is turned on, he said.
Aaron Treadwell told investigators that he “found no evidence to suggest that officer Provenza had deleted anything from the system.”
Allan Treadwell, however, “stated it was a little ‘fishy’ that the in-car camera had data on it the day before and the day after but not on the day in question,” according to the report.
The investigation also found that Police Chief Sam Frank had given Provenza “administrative privileges” beyond his rank to work with the department’s computer and camera systems, which “caused some ill will within the department,” Samson told investigators.
On April 18, 2019, investigators interviewed Provenza, after he’d left Canaan to join the New Hampshire State Police.
During the 45-minute session, Provenza was asked if he had deleted any video from his encounter with Eastman.
“He responded in the negative,” the report stated. “He further explained that while responding to that event, it did not cross his mind to turn the video on.”
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.
