A lawsuit filed today in Mercer County Superior Court seeks the identities and other information regarding officers from the State Police and Mercer Sheriff's Department who fired fifteen shots at Radazz Hearns, now 15, on August 7, 2015. Seven of the shots struck Hearns, causing him to be hospitalized for a week. Despite public outcry and controversy over whether Hearns actually possessed a gun at the time he was shot, law enforcement officials have refused to identify the police officers who fired the shots.
On October 15, 2015, both Isaac Isaac Avilucea of the Trentonian and Keith Brown of NJ Advance Media published articles claiming that their investigations found that Doug Muraglia and James Udijohn were the officers who shot Hearns. When asked to confirm the information in Brown's article, Deputy Attorney General Ryan C. Atkinson refused to do so and claimed that any lawsuit filed to obtain the officers' names would be frivolous.
The lawsuit is captioned John Paff v. Office of the Attorney General, et al., was filed by C.J. Griffin of Hackensack-based law firm Pashman Stein.