David Piegaro himself recorded the video that played over a dozen times at his trial. Chants from a pro-Palestine protest on Princeton’s Cannon Green echo in the background of the 27-second clip, timestamped April 29, 7:46 p.m. Just an hour before, several student protesters were arrested for occupying the Greek-revival style Clio Hall; protestors and Princeton Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers still swarmed the vicinity. In the video, Piegaro, a junior at Princeton, follows three men: Professor Zia Mian, in a button-down shirt with a backpack slung over one shoulder; Assistant Vice President for Public Safety Kenneth Strother, in a dark suit; and Professor Max Weiss, in a short-sleeved navy top, arms crossed. The group walks past Clio, and toward the identical Whig Hall. Piegaro, still recording, ascends the white marble steps along with the trio. At the top of the steps, Piegaro approaches Strother’s right side, and asks, “What’s your name, sir, and position here?” Without responding, Strother opens the door to Whig, letting Mian and Weiss inside, and blocks Piegaro from entering. Here, the camera angle tilts toward the ground. The video is shaky, but Piegaro’s voice is clear: “Don’t touch me, man, don’t touch me.” Strother’s arm reaches out, and the video cuts.

A few seconds later, Piegaro lay on his stomach at the bottom of Whig. Police body cam footage records Piegaro telling an officer, “He threw me down the stairs.” Later that day, Piegaro was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, trespassing, obstruction of law, and resisting arrest. His charges were ultimately reduced; on February 3 and 4, nine months after the incident, Piegaro stood trial for simple assault and trespassing at the Princeton Municipal Court.

A year’s worth of investigations and two days of trial proceedings struggled to answer the question: Did Piegaro fall down the stairs after trying to push past Strother, or was he thrown? The blurred videos became a sort of Rorschach test; both lawyers insisted on their respective witnesses’ version of events as they walked through the same 27 seconds, over and over again.

 

David Piegaro ’25. Photo by Faith Ho.

 

Piegaro, who has close-cropped dark hair and light-brown eyes, is older than the average Princeton student; he was born in 1997 in Trenton, New Jersey. After two semesters at Brandeis University, Piegaro dropped out to serve in the U.S. Army for three years, where he was an intelligence analyst with top-secret clearance. He spent another three years in the New Jersey National Guard. Piegaro was accepted at Princeton, where he is a member of the class of 2025, as part of the University’s veteran transfer student initiative. He will be working for the investment bank Citigroup post-graduation; when I met with him, he often wore a suit, darting between job interviews. He has written for The Daily Princetonian and participates in Jewish life on campus.

Princeton’s pro-Palestine encampment was in full swing when Piegaro decided to document the protests as a “citizen journalist,” as he texted in a group chat with several of his friends on April 29. While Piegaro describes himself as “pro-Israel,” he maintains that he was neither a protestor nor a counter-protestor. (Piegaro’s X account includes documentation of several demonstrations, one as far back as February 2019, which captures an anti-Trump rally.)

Piegaro was distraught and indignant following his arrest. Over the weeks and months that followed, he told and retold his story to friends, University administrators, and professors. When I met him for the first time, on a September afternoon at Frist Campus Center, he wore dark sunglasses and swiveled his head periodically. It struck me that he was both anxious about being overheard and anxious to share his story.

 

If Piegaro were to summarize the events of April 29 in a sentence, the result would perhaps resemble the opening of Kafka’s The Trial: Someone must have slandered P., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine afternoon.

Piegaro’s confusion upon his arrest was compounded by his alignment with the University’s protest policies. In the months prior, Piegaro “monitored communications” on a group chat operated by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). He sent the University information about Princeton’s pro-Palestine encampment, collaborating with prominent campus conservative Matthew Wilson ’24. In a letter to several University officials condemning Piegaro’s arrest sent on May 2, Wilson — who later testified at trial — wrote that Piegaro’s information “played a large role in Public Safety officers being on hand for the beginning of the protest on April 25 and being able to quickly halt attempts to pitch tents in violation of University rules.”

On the morning of April 29, Piegaro noticed pro-Palestinian protest signs as he was walking up campus. Intent on documenting the protests, he returned to the scene in the early evening.

Piegaro took his first photo of the event at 6:07 p.m. Shortly after, protestors took over Clio, hanging keffiyehs and a Palestinian flag outside the window of the building. Piegaro continued to shoot photos and video footage. As DPS tried to clear the protestors, Piegaro used his prox — a key card that allows students access to campus buildings — to enter Whig and walk up to the second floor.

Around 7:45 p.m., back outside among the protestors, Piegaro was filming when a conversation caught his eye. Piegaro recognized History Professor Max Weiss, founder of Princeton’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, speaking to a man in a black suit who looked to him like a University administrator (but who he later learned was Chief Strother). Weiss and Professor Zia Mian served as “informal liaisons” between pro-Palestine student protestors and administrators on April 29, according to Weiss; Mian, who teaches in Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), recalled acting in a “personal capacity” with a goal of supporting students’ free speech.

Piegaro began to record their conversation, which Strother informed him was private. Piegaro continued to film, following the group as they walked away from him. At the top of the Whig steps, Piegaro asked Strother for his name. He received no response.

Piegaro tried to enter the building after Mian and Weiss, but Strother blocked him. The moment that followed was, for him, a blur. According to Piegaro, Strother grabbed him and began to arrest him, and then, out of nowhere, threw him down the stairs.

“I remember being puzzled, and I was thinking, How could I be arrested? I’m not doing anything, he’s not a cop,” Piegaro stated in court testimony. “I remember this questioning moment, like I don’t get it, and then I’m going down the stairs.”

Seconds after his arrest, Piegaro was remarkably composed. He calmly told an officer, “I got thrown down the stairs. He touched me. I was trying to walk through the door.”

Piegaro went to the hospital after his arrest, where he was diagnosed with a concussion and bruised ribs. In the health center lobby the next day, police confiscated the keys to his apartment — as a nontraditional student, Piegaro lives in continuous housing at the Lawrence apartments with his girlfriend — and informed him that he was banned from campus. Piegaro was not let back into his apartment for about two weeks; he stayed with friends off-campus, and then, briefly, in the off-campus Chabad house hosted by Rabbi Eitan Webb. He was not let back on campus for months — much longer than the Clio Hall protestors arrested that day. As his friends took their exams and looked forward to the summer, Piegaro struggled to find housing, vindicate himself, and hold his life together.

 

On Monday, February 3, the courtroom of Princeton’s Municipal Courthouse was divided into two. On the left side of the room sat the defense: Piegaro, his parents and girlfriend, several friends, and his lawyer, Gerald Krovatin. On the right sat the prosecution, including Strother, a line of DPS officers, and Prosecutor Christopher Koutsouris. Judge John McCarthy III ’69 presided over the trial. McCarthy is also currently trying the 13 student protestors who were arrested on April 29 at Clio Hall; the case is scheduled to go to trial on April 12, 2025.

Strother was called to testify first, wearing a black suit like the one he wore on April 29. In a monotone, matter-of-fact voice, he reconstructed the day’s events. After leaving an administrative meeting upon hearing that students had occupied Clio Hall and refused to leave, he spent around two hours on Cannon Green, communicating with protesters via amplifier. While Strother is a police officer, he also frequently attends to administrative duties; on April 29, he wore neither a uniform nor a body camera, which, he testified, was not unusual.

As the situation began to wind down, Strother entered a conversation with Weiss and Mian on Cannon Green. Around 7:45, he noticed that the group was being approached by a person with a cell phone. In the courtroom, when asked to identify the man in question, he gestured to his left, where Piegaro was seated.

Strother informed Piegaro that theirs was a private conversation; Piegaro asserted his right to be present, citing the public nature of the space. Strother then decided to relocate to Whig Hall to finish their conversation in private.

When the group reached the top of the stairs, Strother let Weiss and Mian into the building. He remembers telling Piegaro that the building was closed. When Piegaro continued to push into Strother, he took hold of Piegaro and began to arrest him. As Strother was calling for backup, Piegaro pulled away and fell down the stairs. As Strother later testified in court: “I felt like I was about to lose my balance, and I really didn’t feel like falling down the stairs, I let go of my grasp, and the defendant fell down a couple steps.” Strother recalled feeling “uncomfortable and surprised,” but was not injured.

“I was scared of falling,” he said.

During cross-examination, Krovatin asked Strother if he ever held Piegaro horizontally, “like an open pair of scissors,” as one witness — who remained anonymous to Krovatin and Piegaro until December of last year — claimed. Strother responded: “Absolutely not.”

(When contacted for an interview, Strother redirected the Nass to the Princeton University Office of Communications, which declined to comment.)

Afterward, Koutsouris called a few more witnesses to the stand, including Mian, who testified that Piegaro “did push the chief” as he tried to enter Whig. But he clarified that “this was not an attempt to attack the chief.”

DPS Security Officer Delvy Frias, who saw the altercation from the foot of the Whig steps, described the encounter ambivalently, saying “they both dropped each other.” Strother, Mian, and Frias’s accounts were not entirely consistent. After the first day of the trial, the 27-second clip seemed more muddled.

 

After Strother’s testimony, Judge McCarthy called for a short break. Those observing and participating in the trial, including several DPS officers and Princeton students, filtered in and out of the courtroom. At one point, McCarthy began to banter with a group of male students in suits — Piegaro’s friends, seated behind him. McCarthy asked the group what they studied and which eating clubs they were a part of. A chorus of “Ivys” and “Cottages” followed. He smiled as he quizzed the group on eating club trivia and shared that he used to be in Ivy. Later, I thought of this encounter again when, after all testimonies were concluded, McCarthy asked both lawyers to brief him on a number of questions before he finalized his decision, including: “Does Princeton want its students to have criminal records?”

At these moments, the line between the University, the prosecution, and the Princeton Municipal Court seemed unclear. While Strother is a sworn police officer — making him accountable to the County Prosecutor’s office and State Attorney General — he is also a University administrator. Piegaro told me that it often seemed to him that the State and the University were on the same team. “It’s been really upsetting to see the University back Strother up every step of the way,” Piegaro said. He added that the administration has “refused to be helpful for any kind of basic fact-finding or truth-finding.” Piegaro referred to the University’s failure to provide the court with prox records, which his lawyer repeatedly requested to try to vindicate Piegaro’s trespassing charge.

Princeton’s Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies (ODUS) and DPS conducted parallel investigations of the incident. Piegaro’s ODUS investigation, led by University Investigator Jamie Sandman, found Piegaro “responsible” for violating University policy on  October 6; Piegaro was put on disciplinary probation. While the University does not comment on specific investigations, University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss said “discipline processes are entirely separate from criminal proceedings.” He clarified that “the University is not a party to — and does not intervene in — criminal proceedings,” suggesting that the ODUS investigation, and the University more broadly, had no bearing on the State’s case.

Meanwhile, DPS investigations, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, provided the bedrock of the State’s case. Piegaro called DPS’s investigation into question, citing the fact that DPS waited months to get official statements from witnesses, and did not interview key witnesses at all. According to legal documents and a letter authored by Princeton Records Coordinator Linda DeShaw, the DPS’s evidence collection did not include statements from Weiss, Mian, or Piegaro, among others. (DPS Detective Martin Krzywicki did not respond to the Nass’s request for comment in time for publication.)

 

Throughout the trial, Piegaro kept glancing toward the back of the courtroom as if he was looking for someone — the “scissors witness,” as Sarah Kwartler was exclusively known by Piegaro until last fall. Kwartler, who kept a cardigan pulled around her as she testified, is a grad student in molecular biology. She’s almost always in her lab, which is why she was late to the trial. (Kwartler did not respond to repeated requests for a direct interview.)

That day, Kwartler attended a class at Dillon Gym that ended at 7:30 p.m. Afterward, she walked up campus, circling behind Whig and Clio. Around 7:45, she was directly adjacent to Whig. She saw Piegaro following a group of men with his phone; she kept walking, but turned back when she heard shouts. Kwartler remembers seeing “a large man in a suit, who I now know is Chief Strother, holding David horizontally, kind of like a pair of scissors.” She saw Strother drop Piegaro, who then rolled down the steps. That night, Kwartler sent a video she managed to capture of the incident to a group chat. Rabbi Webb, who was on the group chat, reached out to her to ask her to type up a statement, which she did, shortly after midnight. At this point, Krovatin handed her a piece of paper with that statement for her to read aloud. As Kwartler read, Koutsouris emphatically shook his head.

In cross-examination, Koutsouris interrogated Kwartler about her history with Piegaro. The pair met on Hinge in 2022 and went on two dates together. According to her, they had no substantial interactions past that point: the first time Kwartler saw Piegaro after 2022, he was being held like a pair of scissors by a large man in a black suit.

 

While Professor Max Weiss’s name was invoked several times throughout the trial, he himself was absent. Unlike most witnesses to Piegaro’s arrest, Weiss, unencumbered by legal proceedings, spoke freely when I met with him in February.

At around 7:45 on April 29, Weiss noticed a man standing a few yards away from himself, Mian, and Strother. Weiss had never seen him before and wasn’t sure if he was a student. Given his experience observing pro-Israel activists at Palestine solidarity events, Weiss assumed Piegaro was counterprotesting.

Weiss described Piegaro’s interruption of their conversation as “particularly arrogant.” As Weiss was entering Whig, he saw Piegaro trying to force his way into the building. A few seconds later, he saw Piegaro “wriggle himself out of Ken’s arms as if to throw himself away,” at which point Piegaro fell.

Weiss does not recall Strother picking Piegaro up off the floor and dropping him. “I have heard this narrative about Piegaro being held up and thrown down the steps. It’s entirely ludicrous,” he said.

Weiss himself said that his memory of the event is not perfect — nobody’s memory is. (He at one point told me that Strother was wearing a polo shirt that identified him as a member of DPS. Video evidence shows that Strother was wearing a suit.)

Piegaro and Weiss, who disagree on Israel-Palestine issues, also hold opposing narratives regarding Piegaro’s encounter with Strother. Piegaro told me the incident was one of “obvious police brutality.” Strother, he claimed, “used excessive force and violated the Attorney General’s guidelines for police conduct in New Jersey, and then lied about it all and overcharged me in a totally insane way.”

Weiss suggested that Piegaro has a victim complex. Framing the event as an instance of police brutality is “offensive to me, as someone who is well aware of the brutality of police violence in this country,” he said. It may seem ironic for a white, pro-Israel veteran to accuse a Black officer of police brutality after he himself initiated their encounter.

Weiss’s characterization of Piegaro deviates from his friend’s accounts. Mr. Krovatin called several character witnesses to the stand. Abhishek Kumar, Piegaro’s friend from the army, testified that the latter did not have a reputation for aggressiveness. As William Nash ’25 put it,  “David does not have an aggressive bone in his body,” nor is he known for “challenging authority.” The defense framed Piegaro as an upright student who helped the University uphold its protesting policies, only for the University to turn on him after he was victimized by a DPS officer.

 

“This case is a good example of the way that several different people can look at the same event, and come away, months later, with completely different recollections of what they saw — and more importantly, what they think they saw,” said Krovatin in his final statement. Most witnesses’ accounts, except Kwartler’s, were first documented months after the incident. The backdrop of the pro-Palestine protests and the University’s shadow hung over the proceedings, creating further ambiguity.

By the end of court proceedings, Piegaro was only being considered for simple assault. His trespassing charge was dropped; as video evidence shows, Piegaro never entered Whig.

On April 1, Judge McCarthy ruled Piegaro not guilty, saying that the state did not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Piegaro intended to harm Strother. While Piegaro exhibited “poor judgment in an intense moment” by walking into Strother’s arm, McCarthy said that his actions did not amount to criminal recklessness.

Piegaro was relieved after the verdict — after months of legal turmoil, he has finally been cleared of criminal charges. Months ago, Piegaro filed an internal affairs complaint against Strother with the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office. Now that his criminal trial is over, the complaint can move forward. “I’m really hopeful that the Mercer County prosecutor’s office will do a thorough investigation and there will be some accountability,” he said.

On April 3, Strother was awarded the University’s President’s Achievement for demonstrating excellence and integrity on the job. The University and Koutsouris both declined to comment on the verdict.

“I want an apology,” said Piegaro, for what he has described as the worst year of his life.

McCarthy, for his part, suggested that Piegaro apologize to Strother. “Sir, I hope you take this as a lesson — I think an apology would be appropriate,” he said.

As he was delivering the decision, McCarthy mused on the strictures of the New Jersey legal code; in Scotland, judges may rule “not proven” – a middle ground between “guilty” and “not guilty.” State v. Piegaro, he suggested, falls into this category.

Addressing Piegaro, McCarthy paused for a moment. “You’re not guilty,” he said. “But don’t do it again.”