Lawsuit: Long Beach man says cops ran over legs

A former construction worker from Long Beach testified in Brooklyn federal court Tuesday that he lost his right leg in 2004 when Nassau County police ran him down with an unmarked car to arrest him for a misdemeanor.

Thomas Hartmann, 41, said he was on a tree lawn in a residential neighborhood in Oceanside, running away when a Nassau police officer seeking him for violating an order of protection jumped the curb and crushed both his legs as he ran over him from behind.

"I was not confronting them," said Hartmann, 41, whose excessive force civil suit is in its third week. "I wanted to get away from them. . . . I did not expect to be run over. I ran. I didn't want to go to jail."

The officer who ran over Hartmann, Det. Karl Snelders, a 24-year veteran of the Nassau force, testified last week that Hartmann had previously made threats against police, and was reaching into his waistband as if he had a gun.

But no gun was ever found. "They're the ones who had guns," said Hartmann, a one-time weight lifter and personal trainer who now walks on a prosthetic limb. He told the nine-person jury he now works part-time in a friend's Lynbrook real estate office.

The incident occurred in the afternoon of March 12, 2004. Hartmann was wanted because the night before he had made drunken, harassing calls to his wife in violation of a protection order, and also threatened police who got on the phone, police said.

Snelders and a partner spotted Hartmann at a relative's house the next day, had one confrontation there, and then pulled him over after a high-speed vehicle chase, according to police. The officer said Hartmann was "ranting and raving" as he exited his car, and then made a threatening gesture.

"I intended to bump him and stop him from completely pulling the gun," Snelders said. Afterward, he said, Hartmann was in a pool of blood on the sidewalk with a bone sticking through his sweatpants and his lower limbs grotesquely disfigured.

Hartmann's ex-wife, Kim, testifying on his behalf Tuesday, said she was stunned at what happened, and went to the Nassau University Medical Center that night. When she walked past a group of police officers, one of them "said he would never run after me again," she testified.

Hartmann's suit was filed in 2004. Snelders is the only defendant, but the county will have to pay any damages, and a county lawyer is representing him.

Damages for lost wages and pain and suffering could be substantial. Hartmann was earning union scale construction pay, and choked up as he told jurors about "13 or 14" surgeries he underwent the month after the altercation, and finally agreeing to have his leg amputated 6 inches above the knee.