Bayonne cop who left amputee at side of road needs to be fired

If what Kieran Walsh says happened to him is true, a Bayonne police officer needs to be fired immediately.

Walsh is 59 years old and suffers from diabetes. Two weeks before the run in with a cop on Nov. 27 he had several toes amputated from his left foot because of his disease. He was on his way to pick up pain medication when a car in Walsh's words came "flying down" Andrew Street near the intersection with Avenue C. Walsh thought the guy was traveling entirely too fast and beeped his horn at him.

"Evidently he didn't like that," says Walsh. The speeding driver turned out to be a Stephen Salot, a police officer driving an unmarked car but apparently not on any urgent call since he had the time to stop and pull Walsh over. He told Walsh the reason was because he had a handicap placard hanging from his rearview mirror while the car was in motion. Walsh subsequently was told his registration was expired and therefore was going to have his car towed. He then explained to the officer about his medical situation and that he couldn't walk the five blocks home. Kieran Walsh says the cop didn't care and refused to give him any assistance whatsoever.

"I'm thinking 'Where the hell am I going to go? I'm going to have to walk five blocks home? I'll never make it," said Walsh in an interview with The Jersey Journal. "The pain was unbelievable."

Walsh didn't have any issue with the car being taken. He just wanted to be able to somehow get home without walking on a partially amputated foot. Desperate, he called his wife Melba and begged the officer to speak with her.

According to his wife, "When I talked to him (the officer) I said 'I understand you have to take the car, but my husband just had his foot amputated, he doesn't have a walker, he has no way of getting home, can you at least please stay with him or get him home safely. And he said to me 'Look, I've got paperwork to do and if you continue to waste my time I can find other things to give him a ticket for."

Kieran Walsh spent the better part of an hour hobbling home along Avenue C, taking breaks on strangers' porches and occasionally being assisted by fellow pedestrians when trying to make it across intersections in time. By the time he made it back home his wounds had come open, he was bleeding, and this week he landed back in the hospital due to an infection that set in after the event.

When reporters tried to get the Bayonne Police Department to offer any sort of comment on the situation they refused.

Walsh and his wife filed an internal affairs complaint the very same day, but she says she's not looking for any payday whatsoever. Melba says, "To see a man standing in the street -- all right, take the car if you have to, I understand that's the procedure -- but my God, have a little compassion, the guy is standing there with his foot amputated. I have no intentions of suing, I just don't want to see this ever happen to somebody else again."

If this all went down the way Walsh says it did, if he indeed explained his medical situation to the officer, then this officer needs to be fired. To protect and to serve? It appears Stephen Salot did neither that day. What he did was endanger a man who had already been through enough. Shame on the Bayonne Police Department for refusing to offer any explanation.

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