Former Trenton firefighter Jesse Diaz set up fellow firefighters in surreptitious tapes so he could “gain more juice” for a lawsuit he planned to file against the city fire department over perceived mistreatment for reporting a colleague for using a racial slur, a city attorney said.
Michael Sullivan, the attorney representing the city in Diaz’s civil case, zeroed in on secretly recorded conversations the now-retired driver and war veteran had with Capt. Mark Buriani in 2012 to suggest Diaz had dollar signs in his eyes when he flipped on his phone recorder.
“You’re only going to get half-truths,” Sullivan said in his closing argument. “Jesse Diaz was manipulating the conversation and manipulating him at the same time.”
Diaz, a 12-year veteran of the department who did three tours of duty overseas, could no longer do his job after he admitted to his counselor at the Veteran Affairs Hospital in Philadelphia he had panic attacks, flashbacks to Iraq and lost strength at fires, Sullivan said.