Four Baltimore police officers, including since federally convicted Gun Trace Task Force detective Daniel Hersl , planted a gun on a man’s porch in 2014 and stole about $5,000 from his house, the man says in a new federal lawsuit.
The officers arrested Keyon Paylor that day.
“In jail calls to family members shortly after his arrest, Paylor claimed that the gun had been planted and alleged that officers had searched through his possessions and stole money from his residence,” federal prosecutors wrote in recent court documents.
In 2015, Paylor nonetheless pleaded guilty to firearm possession in federal court and a judge sentenced him to 5 years in prison. His lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, said he took the plea to avoid the potential for additional prison time for a state probation violation and because he thought nobody would believe him.
But after listening to his jail calls, federal authorities approached Paylor as part of their investigation into Hersl and the corrupt GTTF . Prosecutors said he told them his account of what happened and explained the same in his testimony before a grand jury.
Paylor has moved to vacate his conviction on several occasions, citing Hersl’s conviction on racketeering and robbery charges. In February, years after Paylor finished his prison sentence, prosecutors joined his request to throw out the guilty plea, writing that doing so was in “the interests of justice.” A judge tossed Paylor’s conviction March 4.
A little over a year after he was released from prison in 2018, Paylor was indicted in Baltimore Circuit Court. He pleaded guilty to robbery and carrying a handgun, with a judge sentencing him to six years in prison. Court documents show the federal judge who presided over his gun case gave him 15 months in prison for violating his probation. He was released in December, according to prison records.
Paylor, now 32, is seeking to remedy what he and his attorneys described as a grave injustice, “his wrongful conviction and imprisonment,” with a civil rights lawsuit against the Baltimore Police Department and four officers involved in his arrest, Hersl, John Burns, Timothy Romeo and Jordan Moore.
“For far too long, Detective Hersl and his colleagues at the BPD abused their police powers, committing crimes while hiding behind their badges,” one of Paylor’s attorneys, Gayle Horn of the firm Loevy + Loevy, said in a statement. “This misconduct was deeply entrenched in the Baltimore Police Department long before Keyon Paylor’s arrest, but the BPD did nothing to curtail it, and innocent men like Mr. Paylor paid the price for the City’s complicity and indifference.”
The complaint says Paylor walked onto his porch Jan. 2, 2014, and turned around to see the officers behind him. After speaking with his stepfather inside, Paylor walked back toward the front door, only for the officers to come “running up the porch and into his home” without a warrant and with “no legal basis.”
Burns went upstairs while the other officers searched Paylor and spoke with him, according to the lawsuit. Inside Paylor’s room, Burns allegedly rifled through his dresser.
“Defendant Burns took Mr. Paylor’s money, which he kept in his drawers,” Paylor’s attorneys wrote. “Defendant Burns took approximately $4,500 to $5,000.”
From the top of the stairs, Burns told the other officers to take Paylor outside, the complaint said.
“Once they were outside, one of the Officer Defendants lifted up the seat cushion to the chair on the front porch,” the lawsuit reads. “There was a black handgun under the chair. That handgun was not Mr. Paylor’s and Mr. Paylor truthfully told the Officer Defendants as much. The Officer Defendants then fabricated that they had seen Mr. Paylor put the handgun under the seat cushion.”
Prosecutors said in a recent filing that Hersl “wrote all of the reports for the events that day.”
Hersl is still serving an 18-year sentence in federal prison. A judge in November denied his request for compassionate release , saying the need to send “a message” about the disgraced detective’s conduct outweighed his sympathy for Hersl’s terminal cancer diagnosis .
Baltimore Police did not respond Friday to a request for comment or questions about the other named officers’ employment.
Burns, a sergeant who was hired in 2001, made about $109,000 in fiscal year 2022, the latest city salary data available. Hired in 2009, Romeo made roughly $91,000 in the same year. It’s unclear from the salary data whether Moore is still employed by the police department.
Paylor’s complaint says the officers violated his constitutional due process rights, also accusing them of participating in a conspiracy and malicious prosecution. It says the department failed to adequately train, supervise and discipline its officers. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages.
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