Two Plymouth men are facing criminal charges after a video appeared on the Facebook page ‘All Things Plymouth’ showing them allegedly punching and shoving a woman who is mentally ill and has no home.
The alleged attack took place on April 8, but it wasn’t until May 20, when a caller alerted police to the online video, that Plymouth investigators were able to piece together what happened. The video, which was posted anonymously, has since been taken down.
The alleged attackers told police they were unaware the woman was disabled but the officer said any “reasonable person” could see she was not a threat, according to police records.
Joshua Wallace and Matthew Miller, both 20, are scheduled to be arraigned June 2 on charges of assault and battery on a disabled person and disorderly conduct.
Court records did not identify lawyers for either man.
The caller told police he recognized the alleged victim, Dominique Pina, because he works for Father Bill’s & Mainspring, an organization which works to support people without homes, where she is served weekly. Police too could identify her from the video.
The Independent is identifying the alleged victim because she was named multiple times online.
Pina has had many encounters with the police. The 49-year-old woman has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been seen communicating with people who aren’t there, records show.
She has been charged more than a dozen times since 2020 for minor offenses, such as trespassing — that is, showing up at places she had been banned from.
In his report on the alleged assault, Plymouth police officer Nicholas Hunt described how the harrowing attack continued even after Pina was on the ground.
His report described how the struggle appeared to start in front of the Yellow Deli on North Street, with Wallace shoving Pina.
She fell on her back and tried to kick Wallace away, he wrote. Wallace then grabbed her by the shoulder and elbowed her in the face with his arm while she was on the ground.
He kept punching her, the police report said.
Miller then intervened, grabbing Pina’s jacket and pushing her down, “almost causing her head to hit the concrete,” Hunt wrote.
The video doesn’t capture the entire assault “but it is clear that both parties continue to assault Dominique as she was trying to defend herself,” Hunt wrote.
Police questioned Pina but she “refused to confirm that this assault happened. She stated that it was not her,” Hunt wrote.
Wallace called the station to “give his side of the story,” the police report said. He said he was “in fear for his life,” and unaware Pina was disabled.
He told police he heard her yelling and approached her. She struck first,” he said, slapping him in the face and scratching him.
He responded by grabbing her, taking her to the ground and assaulting her with his elbow and fist. Miller, his friend, then “took hold of her and pushed her,” he told police.
Hunt told Wallace the video contradicted his account, showing instead how he was in “complete control of her mobility, pushing her to the ground and hitting her multiple times.
“The level of force was unnecessary and excessive,” he wrote.
Wallace admitted he may have “went too hard,” the officer wrote.
Miller told police Wallace and Pina got into altercation and “began slapping each other. When Pina was on the ground, he said he tried to separate them by pulling her off Wallace.
But, Hunt wrote, the video showed Miller grabbing Pina and shoving her down, and she nearly struck her head on the pavement.
If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison and a $1,000 fine, or both.
Pina was not always homeless nor was she always mentally ill, according to news accounts and court records.
Once a security supervisor at the former Pilgrim nuclear power plant, Pina described her mental decline in an emotional 2022 Patriot Ledger story.
About seven years before the story ran, she said, she started hearing things, which she described as “amplified sound, as if you were at a concert.”
She said she would sometimes find herself walking down the street, talking out loud to herself. “You can’t control it,” she said.
“It was scary,” said Pina, who grew up in Plymouth. “I never had mental illness before. I was fine. I was working. Just living life.”
Unable to continue working at the power plant, she volunteered for the Council on Aging’s Meals on Wheels program in Plymouth, the story said.
For a time, she lived in a Plymouth Housing Authority apartment in the Cherry Hill Development but was evicted after being accused of tormenting her neighbors and destroying her apartment, according to court records.
Neighbors said she roamed the halls late at night, banging on doors, smashing walls and destroying equipment like a security camera and a light switch plate. She generally gutted her apartment, according to a motion for a injunction the Plymouth Housing Authority filed in 2020.
Several tenants filed affidavits saying they were terrified of her.
But others in Plymouth remembered her in happier times, describing her in comments posted on Facebook after the assault video appeared as a sweet, kind person.
“It’s heartbreaking when a person who once had so much going for them ends up struggling without the protection they need. Watching that video of the assault brought me to tears,” wrote someone identified as Carrieann Best on Facebook.
“Mental health services often fail people long before tragedies like this happen,” she wrote in a post that drew more than 200, mostly sympathetic, comments.
Some questioned why it took so long for the two alleged assailants to be charged.
“Plymouth and our police department need to step it up and do better at keeping vulnerable people safe,” she wrote. “The mental health system failed her, and she didn’t deserve to be assaulted by these 2 cowards.
“Plymouth needs to not fail her too.”
Pina has received help from Plymouth’s special mental health court, which serves mentally ill criminal offenders by offering treatment plans and supervision instead of detention, according to court records.
She is due for a competency hearing on July 15, court records show.
But whatever treatment she received is not enough, an expert on criminal justice and mental health said.
Kellie Wallace, an associate professor at Lasell College, called the story “heartbreaking” and “yet another example of how we are still dealing with the impacts of deinstitutionalization.”
“The community mental health centers set up to help folks like her were closed en masse starting in the 1970s,” said Wallace. She said as many as 90% have shut down since then.
Pina, she said, appears to be “suffering from a mental illness that is not being treated and engaging in concerning but overall nonviolent behaviors.”
Police, who seemed sympathetic, are trained in crisis intervention, she said, but young people are uninformed about mental health and illness, she said, and “misinformation is rampant on social media.
“Without knowing any better, someone who is having a mental health crisis could come across as intoxicated or potentially threatening,” she said.
“Individuals with mental illnesses are 11-13 times more likely to be victims as opposed to perpetrators of violent crime as well, so when you are at the intersection of those identities, your risk of victimization increases exponentially,” she added.
Andrea Estes can be reached at andrea@plymouthindependent.org.