Jun. 3—Santa Fe police chief Paul Joye said on the witness stand Monday he didn’t handle an investigation into two officers’ use of force against a protester in October 2020, so he couldn’t explain why the internal probe didn’t include interviews with either officer or the protester.

“I would have handled it differently, but that doesn’t mean they handled it wrong,” said Joye, who was deputy chief of operations at the time.

He was testifying in a trial over a civil lawsuit filed by Dylan Wrobel, 30, who alleges he was falsely arrested at an Indigenous Peoples Day rally on the downtown Plaza and assaulted by an officer during a confrontation that preceded the felling of the more than 150-year-old obelisk.

Wrobel’s lawsuit also accuses the city of malicious abuse of process, alleging the police department charged him with battery upon a peace officer, resisting arrest and criminal trespass to cover up the actions of officers who were “indiscriminately grabbing, pushing and shoving” protesters, including him.

The trial began Thursday for the complaint, which seeks an unspecified amount of actual and punitive damages. Wrobel’s attorney rested his case Monday. The city is expected to call several witnesses as the trial continues Tuesday.

Lapel camera video from the Oct. 12, 2020, incident shows one officer grab Wrobel around the neck and drag him to the ground and another officer spray him with pepper gas after he was down.

Jurors have viewed the altercation between Wrobel and Officers Javier Vigil and Manuel Romero — both named as defendants — from several officers’ body camera videos.

The videos show a chaotic scene as police try to protect a permitter around the controversial monument. Workers had been erecting a wooden barrier around it but abandoned the project after demonstrators began to lie down on the construction materials and toss metal crowd barriers out of the way.

Known as the Soldiers’ Monument, the obelisk was built in the late 1860s in honor of Civil War Union Soldiers and those who died in battle with Indigenous people. The monument had long drawn controversy over an inscription that referred to “savage Indians,” although the word “savage” was chiseled off in 1974.

Videos of the Indigenous Peoples Day rally before the obelisk’s destruction show Wrobel attempting to reconnect with his girlfriend, who is in the center of the crowd; Vigil tells him and others to stay back.

At one point the two men exchange words. Vigil asks Wrobel what he needs, and Wrobel essentially says he needs to stay where he his so he can meet with his friends.

Romero filed a report alleging Wrobel battered Vigil, putting both hands on the officer’s chest and pushing him as he tried to get into what had been the construction zone, and this prompted Vigil to take him to the ground.

However, none of the police videos show him push the officer with two hands.

Romero testified last week he completed the report based only on his conversation with Vigil; he hadn’t reviewed Vigil’s lapel camera video.

Romero said in court the report was not entirely accurate and that the aggressive contact by Wrobel was more of a shoulder-to-shoulder “body check.”

The city’s attorney has argued Wrobel faced a trespassing charge based on his attempt to enter the construction area, while Wrobel has asserted the area around the obelisk was and always has been a public space.

Wrobel said on the stand he told Vigil the space was public, and the officer — a former Marine who testified he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and hypervigilance — “snapped” and began to attack him.

“It didn’t feel like normal police procedures,” Wrobel testified Monday. “It just felt like someone losing their sense of reality on me [and] freaking out.”

About seven officers were at the scene that day, facing down about 200 people who were becoming increasingly unruly, according to one officer’s testimony.

The officers would later leave the Plaza after higher-ups determined they were dangerously outnumbered. Demonstrators then attached chains to the monument and pulled it down in sections.

Wrobel said police never got his side of the story — not at the scene, not back at the station before charging him and not before completing an investigation that found the force the officers used against him was justified.