New Hampshire
Concord Real Estate Agent Arrested In New Hampshire GOP Keyed Cars Cases: Follow-Up
Lawrence Anthony Dunlap, 37, of South Spring Street in Concord, was arrested on Friday on 11 felony counts of criminal mischief. He was charged after a nearly two week investigation into close to a dozen vehicles that were keyed and damaged around Concord High School during the New Hampshire GOP convention at the school. The party rented the Christa McAuliffe Auditorium and the Main Street corridor for the function. In the early afternoon, when attendees began to leave, many with political license plates, including state representative registrations and political stickers, called police after seeing their vehicles damages.
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Detectives, according to Det. Sgt. Benjamin Mitchell of the Concord Police Department obtained video footage of a suspect — a white man with a beard and dark hair, riding a “longboard” skateboard near the damaged vehicles. A Concord Regional Crimeline alert was issued about the case and the suspect was later identified as Dunlap, Mitchell said.
A search warrant was requested for his apartment on South Spring Street.
On Friday morning, an “officer safety” BOLO (be-on-the-lookout) alert for “protective custody” with “possible mental health issues” was broadcast to law enforcement agencies around the state accusing Dunlap of leaving his home around 10:45 a.m. by foot. The alert stated a search warrant of Dunlap’s home “yielded firearms, a manifesto, suicide notes, and a bag containing zip ties, masks, and gloves.” In the alert, police said they believed all Dunlap’s vehicles were at his home. Police were working on an arrest warrant related to a felony criminal mischief incident, the alert stated.
Patch arrived at the scene just a few minutes after his arrest on South Spring Street. Neighbors reported police were at the building for several hours.
After being arrested, Mitchell said, Dunlap was held on preventative detention.
Dunlap, according to his Facebook feed, made some vague political statements online, attempting to create conversations with his friends. Some posts, however, were overtly political, espousing left-of-center views. In one, he likened the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol building to “domestic terrorism” and shared a “socialism” graphic purporting to show “red” states received more in federal benefits than “blue” states.
“Some interesting data,” he wrote. “I did not fact-check it, so take it with a grain of salt.”
Dunlap was hired as a real estate agent for Realty One Group Next Level in October 2022, according to a Facebook post as well as real estate information online.
Police are “continuing with this investigation,” Mitchell said, with detectives asking anyone with information to contact Det. Evan Cristy of the Problem Oriented Policing (POP) Unit at 603-225-8600.
Tips can also be submitted anonymously through the Concord Regional Crimeline at 603-226-3100 or online at concordregionalcrimeline.com.
A free, 24/7, confidential service can provide people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress or those around them with support, information, and local resources. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
New Hampshire
Here’s why the verdict in New Hampshire’s landmark trial over youth center abuse is being disputed – The Boston Globe
No hearing has been scheduled, but here are some things to know about how the dispute unfolded.
THE TRIAL
Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents of what is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades.
Meehan’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial. Over four weeks, his attorneys contended that the state encouraged a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence.
The state portrayed Meehan as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and delusional adult lying to get money. Defense attorneys also said the state was not liable for the conduct of rogue employees and that Meehan waited too long to sue.
THE VERDICT
Jurors unanimously agreed that Meehan filed his lawsuit in a timely fashion, that he was injured at the facility and that the state’s negligence caused his injuries. They awarded him $18 million in compensatory damages and an additional $20 million in enhanced damages after finding the state acted with reckless indifference or abused its power.
Jurors were unaware of the state law that caps damages at $475,000 per incident. When asked on the verdict form how many incidents they found Meehan had proven, they wrote “one.”
WHAT COUNTS AS AN INCIDENT?
That’s where it gets tricky.
In pre-verdict discussions without the jury present, lawyers for the state argued that all of Meehan’s claims arose out of a single incident of alleged negligence. Meehan’s lawyers insisted that each act of physical or sexual abuse be counted as a separate incident, even those that happened simultaneously.
“Merely raping a kid is bad enough, but it’s even worse, and a separate incident, if it also involves hitting him in the head or kicking him in the ribs or other things to get him to comply,” Meehan’s attorney David Vicinanzo said.
At one point, the judge considered including a list of the type of abuse alleged on each date on the verdict form and asking jurors to determine whether an injury occurred and whether the state was liable. But the state argued that providing such a list would be prejudicial to Meehan’s side.
Judge Andrew Schulman said he disagreed with both parties and if forced to define “incident,” he would consider all the acts that happened in a given “episode” to be one incident. That put him closer to the plaintiff’s view, but in the end, he said he would leave it up to the state Supreme Court to settle.
“Why go out and define something that there’s a 50% chance of being wrong if it doesn’t need to be defined in the first place?” he said. “They can deal with it, but I don’t think I have to.”
Attorney Martha Gaythwaite, representing the state, did not address the issue in her closing statement to jurors. Vicinanzo told the jury that Meehan was raped an estimated 200 times, beaten 200 times and held in unjustified solitary confinement for roughly 100 days.
“I want to emphasize to you that the numbers are very important,” he said.
In his verbal instructions to the jury, Schulman said that rather than asking jurors to list “incident by incident” decisions, he asked for “just the number of incidents for which you find liability based on timely claims.” The verdict form itself defined incident as a “(a) single episode during which the plaintiff was injured; (b) for which injuries the jury has found DHHS liable in response to previous questions; (c) on claims the jury found to be timely claims in response to question 1.”
In response to that question, the jury wrote “one.”
BUT WHAT DID THEY MEAN?
One juror explained it like this: “We wrote on our verdict form that there was 1 incident/injury, being complex PTSD, from the result of 100+ injuries (Sexual, Physical, emotional abuse),” the juror wrote in an email to Meehan’s attorneys. “We were never informed of a cap being placed per incident of abuse and that is wrong how the question was worded to us.
“The state is making their own interpretation of the ruling that we made, and that is not right for them to assume our position,” the juror wrote. “David should be entitled to what we awarded him, which was $38 million.”
In separate emails to the attorneys, the jury foreperson described a sleepless night of crying after learning about the cap.
“We had no idea,” the jury foreperson wrote. “Had we known that the settlement amount was to be on a per incident basis, I assure you, our outcome would have reflected it. I pray that Mr. Meehan realizes this and is made as whole as he can possibly be within a proper amount of time.”
In an interview with StateScoop last week, New Hampshire Chief Information Officer Denis Goulet said the state’s multiyear effort to retool its online citizens services, which include website redesigns and new accessibility features, started with evangelizing state agencies that were initially reluctant to participate.
“I was going to every agency and talking to them about how you flip around the perspective” Goulet said. “I told them straight up their opinion on whether their website is good or not doesn’t matter. It’s their constituents opinion that matters.”
Goulet said the New Hampshire Department of Technology has moved about 70% of the executive branch agency websites to a cloud platform and that they now share a common design. He said the standardized online appearance of the state government has garnered good feedback.
Goulet said the new website platform has expanded traffic-monitoring capabilities, which were put to the test during the COVID-19 pandemic when many state websites saw high traffic. He said that stress test eliminated worry of future crashes.
Goulet said the platform was also built to be “accessible by default,” but that adding new documents or applications to the platform and making them accessible requires additional work, so his office is training agency leaders how to do that. He said the Department of Justice’s release last month of final accessibility rules regarding state and local web and application content has been helpful.
“I’m getting [state agencies] calling me saying, ‘Alright, what are we going to do?’ That’s perfect. So I think we’re really going to up our game in New Hampshire based on just using that as a lever to help us make it important,” Goulet said.
Goulet said he hopes that within six months the state will have a new business services portal running. He called it a “transformational event” for New Hampshire.
“I really do think that for anybody that’s working on citizen experience or user experience, flip the perspective, go to the people who you’re serving to determine if you’re doing it right,” he said.
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