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Second Generation Pastor Shares New Details, Statement on Incident When Officer Tased his Father

Rizutti explains that, at that point, his sister was leaving to drive people home from church and then planned to “deal with any further questions from the officer at her home.”

“As this conversation with Officer Nunez was peacefully ending,” says Rizutti Jr., “another officer showed up on scene, Cappabianca (body cam officer), and he immediately started being rude and demanding our church members and church visitors to leave and get out of there.” The pastor says that churchgoers were not able to leave immediately because some of them were waiting on Rachael Rizutti to get a ride home and some “were blocked in by cruisers.”

“There were no words exchanged by myself or my father with Officer Cappabianca prior to the [body cam] video sound,” says Rizutti Jr. “You can hear the officer ask my father who is he and that he has no business there. My father said, ‘Pardon me,’ and the officer stated it again, then my father said he does have something to do with it because not only was this outside of our church, but it was his daughter and granddaughter.”

Rizutti Jr. continues:

After seeing police break up our church service, try to take a child without any court order or legal right, the officers being nasty to our church members, then once we were alone just my father, myself, and the two officers and he continued to tell us to go inside or get out of there, my father not only practiced his first amendment right by stating that the officer “was acting like a tyrant,” he also requested to have a supervisor on scene immediately. So rather [than] the officer take being told he was acting like a tyrant and calling their supervisor to the scene, the officer decided to charge my father (as he went inside like the officer requested), he [assaulted] me and threw me out the way, and then proceeded to chase, hit, and taser my father multiple times. Then the assaults went to myself, and my pregnant wife being struck by an officer for just being near him. 

“I was standing asking what they were doing tasing my father,” says Rizzuti Jr., when “Officer Nunez punched me in my face.” The pastor says Nunez continued to assault him and pulled out his pepper spray, after which Rizzuti Jr. “pleaded” with Nunez not to use the spray because there were women and children nearby. As Nunez was “throwing my belongings out of my pockets,” Rizutti Jr. says his wife, Karissa, started picking them up. As she did so, Nunez “punched her with a closed fist in the face, threw her to the ground and stepped on her back with her pregnant belly bent over our platform just inches from the pulpit (this is in [the] video when you hear us all start yelling, ‘Hey she’s pregnant’).”  

Rizzuti Jr. expressed that his church has been friendly toward police in the past. “We have worked side by side with patrol officers during our street outreach to the Main South and Grafton Hill areas of the city since the church was established in 2016,” he says. “We were a small mission-minded ministry in the second largest city of New England. We supported and regularly prayed for our first responders, and it was very alarming when we saw what they can do first hand…It is a shame that some of the officers act the way they do in the poor, inner city areas, whether it’s a street corner or a church house!”