Former Methuen Police Chief Joseph Solomon Heads to Pretrial Conference August 14
Written by: Dan Shibilia
New news on the Solomon front….
In the case that just doesn't seem to move… we finally have some progress. A final pretrial conference in the criminal case against former Police Chief Joseph Solomon is set for Friday, August 14 at 11 a.m. at Essex Superior Court in Salem, another step toward a trial now expected to begin in September. This is the first major court date in the case since the co-defendant at the center of it, former make-believe police officer Sean Fountain, pleaded guilty and was sentenced.
“Sentenced” is a strong word there since he basically walked with a slap on the wrist.. but more on this in a minute.
Solomon, who led the Methuen Police Department for years before stepping down, faces two Essex Superior Court indictments, docket numbers 2377CR00451 and 2377CR00452, alleging he abused his authority as chief to circumvent the state’s civil service hiring rules and then lied about it to state regulators.
The Fountain Case Already Played Out and Angered City Hall
Solomon wasn’t indicted alone. He was charged in 2023 alongside Sean Fountain, the Methuen City Councilor turned Police Officer, accused of never having been a legitimately trained police officer at all. Prosecutors said Fountain forged a certificate claiming he’d graduated from a 1995 police academy class, doctoring it from an authentic certificate belonging to a retired officer, and then spent roughly four years working the job anyway, arresting, searching, and initiating prosecutions against more than 40 Methuen-area residents who had no idea the officer detaining them lacked any legal authority to do so.
Fountain was set to change his plea back in November 2025, but the hearing was derailed when Superior Court Judge Thomas Dreschler raised concerns about victim-impact statements submitted by Mayor D.J. Beauregard and current Police Chief Scott McNamara, both of which leaned heavily on the city’s potential civil liability… a factor the judge said had no place in a criminal sentencing decision.
Fountain ultimately pleaded guilty on December 17, 2025. The judge ruled the City of Methuen didn’t legally qualify as a “victim” and barred Beauregard and McNamara from reading their statements aloud in court. Fountain was sentenced to probation, with no jail time and effectively no restitution. This outcome was later blasted to the public by the mayor and chief as a “slap on the wrist.” All and all, it was a major failure and blackeye for the Commonwealth and all parties involved but nobody seemed to care besides the residents of Methuen.
SOME city leaders have made no secret of where they think accountability should go next. After the November hearing, Mayor Beauregard told reporters that accountability was needed for everyone involved in “this conspiracy,” not just Fountain. Chief McNamara has been just as direct, calling the scheme a “criminal conspiracy” and describing Fountain as, in effect, a civilian who’d been “masquerading as a police officer” for years with others in positions of authority aware of it.
What Solomon Is Accused Of
According to the Final Pretrial Conference Memorandum filed jointly by prosecutors and defense counsel, the Commonwealth alleges that between 2015 and 2020, then-Chief Solomon improperly hired six individuals, who were on Methuen’s non-civil-service intermittent roster, into positions as full-time civil service police officers, complete with all the pay and benefits that come with full civil service status.
This played out pretty publicly in the 2019 budget cycle.
Prosecutors go further, alleging Solomon committed perjury by knowingly listing those improperly hired officers on an official document submitted to the state’s Human Resources Division.
A separate and more specific set of allegations centers on one of those officers, Sean Fountain. The Commonwealth alleges that throughout Fountain’s employment, Solomon made materially false statements about Fountain’s qualifications to serve as a police officer and uttered a forged document related to those qualifications. Discovery filings in the case reference a “Copy of Sean Fountain Forged NERPI Certificate,” along with a denied search warrant application and a later granted one, both tied to an affidavit asserting Fountain graduated the police academy in May 1996.
Solomon denies all of the allegations. He is not in custody. The icing on the cake is that he is drawing a massive pension from the City.
The Scope of the Case
If the witness list is any indication, this is not a small case. According to the State Court website, this case is on the DCM Track - Most Complex. The pretrial memo lists 44 potential witnesses, including:
More than two dozen current and former Methuen city and police personnel
Officials from the state Human Resources Division and the Civil Service Commission
Massachusetts State Police investigators
A Homeland Security Investigations agent
Keepers of records from the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission and the Massachusetts Police Training Council
Sean Fountain himself, along with his wife Terri Fountain, who was also a Methuen officer
It is worth looking at the list of individuals listed by Solomon and his team that can/may be called in his defense.
Solomon’s own attorneys have signaled he may take the stand in his own defense as his name appears on the supplemental witness list his team submitted. If he does, it cuts both ways: it also opens him up to cross-examination by the prosecution, which alone will be worth the trip to Salem.
But Solomon isn’t the only name on that supplemental list worth a second look. A handful of the additions are Methuen political insiders whose presence signals the defense wants firsthand accounts from people who were inside City Hall, or close to it, during the years in question:
Paul Fahey served as chief of staff to Mayor James Jajuga from 2018 to 2019 putting him squarely inside the window (2015–2020) when the Commonwealth alleges the improper hiring took place. As the mayor’s top aide during that stretch, Fahey is positioned to have firsthand knowledge of what City Hall knew and when. It begs the question… is he a charter witness or is Joe using him to show wrongdoing by someone else?
Jana DiNatale, a former Assistant District Attorney, served as chief of staff to Mayor Neil Perry from 2020 to 2021, meaning she’d have had a City Hall vantage point on the tail end of the alleged scheme and its immediate aftermath. She’s been publicly supportive of Solomon. The same question persists here, is she a charter witness or is Joe using him to show wrongdoing by someone else?
Andrea McCann (Traficanti) is a familiar name around Methuen and Lawrence political circles, largely through her husband’s history of city employment and involvement in local politics. Frank McCann is the former Lawrence DPW director, and her former boss, who also did a stint as Methuen’s DPW Deputy Director under his good friend former Mayor Jajuga. This was the catalyst that drove Director Pat Bower out of Methuen the first time. By reputation, she remains extremely active behind the scenes working to advance her agenda and those connected within City Hall.
Ron Marsan, the currently sitting East District City Councilor, is also on the list and he’s been an open, vocal defender of Solomon’s. The question here is can he both serve the City as a Councilor and defend someone who has, beyond any reasonable doubt, committed atrocities against the City he was sworn to protect and serve?
Whether any of them add real substance to the defense’s case or simply speak to Solomon’s character, watching City Hall–adjacent figures take the stand and face cross-examination is likely to be one of the more closely watched parts of the trial.
The Commonwealth’s exhibit list is similarly sprawling… printed statutes, emails, civil service records, training certificates, recordings of Civil Service Commission hearings, MPTC/CJTC training documents, and City of Methuen records including the city charter.
A companion discovery filing, the Commonwealth’s sixth notice of discovery in the case, shows prosecutors have turned over a dense trove of material to the defense: forensic lab reports from Homeland Security Investigations, personnel files, interview records with more than a dozen current and former city and department figures, an FBI property inventory referencing bags of evidence recovered from what’s described as “yellow cards,” and records tied to a since-filed lawsuit by Sean Fountain against the town.
What’s Left to Decide
The parties say they still need to litigate “required findings” motions and at least one motion in limine over how statements by an alleged coconspirator can be used at trial. Both sides note additional pretrial motions may surface as the case heads toward trial. For those who didn’t go to law school or major in latin, a motion in limine is a request one side files before trial asking the judge to decide, in advance, whether a certain piece of evidence or testimony can be allowed in, or has to be kept out, once the jury is seated.
Andrew Gambaccini is representing Solomon. Marina Moriarty, a Special Assistant Attorney General assigned through the Essex District Attorney’s Office, is handling the case for the Commonwealth.
Thursday’s conference in Salem is largely procedural… a final tune-up before trial, which the pretrial memo and prior reporting indicate is expected in September. But for a lot of Methuen residents, the case never really felt procedural. It’s the reason more than 40 arrests made by an unqualified officer are now legally vulnerable, the reason city leaders are bracing for civil lawsuits, and, in the mayor’s and chief’s own public words, the reason they don’t consider the story over just because Fountain’s case closed with probation. As Chief McNamara put it after Fountain’s plea: the city expects it will be held accountable for those arrests “the day will come, I am certain of it.”
Solomon has not been convicted of any crime and, legally, remains presumed innocent unless and until a jury says otherwise. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about why this trial matters to Methuen: the city’s own current mayor and police chief have publicly and repeatedly said, on the record, that they don’t believe the conspiracy stopped with Fountain. Thursday’s hearing in Salem is the next real step toward finding out whether a jury agrees.
For those of you who want to see the documents in all their glory for yourselves, we’ve added them to our google drive site…