A cop facing misconduct charges in the 2024 death of a Queens teenager experiencing a mental health crisis will dodge a disciplinary trial because the NYPD failed to notify the police oversight panel he had put in his papers to retire.
Police Officer Salvatore Alongi is one of two cops the Civilian Complaint Review Board found had violated department guidelines regarding abuse of authority and excessive use of force in a deadly March 2024 interaction with 19-year-old Win Rozario inside his family’s Ozone Park home.
The department is required to notify the CCRB if a cop facing disciplinary charges has begun the process of retiring, in order to give the watchdog agency a chance to speed up a disciplinary trial. That did not happen with Alongi, and on Thursday Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch acknowledged the mistake and issued a mea culpa.
“When we make a mistake, we need to acknowledge it,” Tisch said in a statement. “We should have notified the CCRB before the Pension Board considered Officer Alongi’s disability pension so that CCRB could take whatever steps it deemed appropriate. As a result of human error, we failed to do so, and I apologize for that mistake.”
‘This is Betrayal’
The commissioner’s statement came about an hour after Rozario’s family held a press conference outside City Hall to excoriate Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani for letting Alongi retire without facing the music.
Rozario’s mother, Notan Eva Costa, addressed the mayor directly, saying, “You came to my home and said you would be a different kind of mayor. We feel betrayed by you. Jessica Tisch is your police commissioner. She let Alongi retire without a trial. It seems like you are just letting this happen.”
“This is not justice,” she added. “This is a betrayal.”
Costa called on the Department of Investigation to figure out what happened, while her husband, Francis Rozario, charged that the mistake “is not negligence. I feel it’s a deliberate coverup and corruption at the highest levels of the NYPD.”
The mayor’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.
A chronology released by the NYPD put the blame on an unnamed civilian employee who the department says failed to make the required notification. The employee has since been demoted and is no longer involved in handling disciplinary cases, according to the NYPD.
The police department said Alongi put in his papers for a disability pension in August 2025 — a year and five months after the incident and about three weeks before CCRB determined that he and Officer Matthew Cianfrocco had used excessive force during the encounter with Rozario.
The CCRB recommended disciplinary action, which the police commissioner has the ability to adopt or reject. Tisch notified the two cops that they would face disciplinary charges in September 2025.
At that point, the department should have notified CCRB that Alongi had a pending request to retire. The police pension fund could then temporarily table the pension request to give the oversight board an opportunity to expedite the administrative trial.
But CCRB didn’t find out that Alongi had retired until last August, nine weeks after his last day on the force. Dakota Gardner, a CCRB spokesperson, declined to comment on the department’s failure over Alongi. Instead he noted that the trial of Officer Cianfrocco “will continue as planned,” although no date has been set.
“The killing of Win Rozario was a tragedy, and our thoughts are with his family,” he added.
The afternoon of March 27, 2024, Alongi and Cianfrocco responded to a 911 call from Rozario’s mother saying that her son appeared to be on drugs and was “acting mad erratic.” When they appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, Rozario — standing next to his mother — picked up scissors the minute he saw the two officers.
In police body camera footage, Officer Alongi immediately hit Rosario with a Taser. Rozario’s mother wrested the scissors away from her son and placed them on a chair, turning to the officers to beg them not to shoot. Alongi then struck Rozario with a second Taser shot, even though Rozario had no weapon in his hands. Rozario then picked up the scissors and began to advance towards the cops. Cianfrocco shot him once with his service revolver, then fired four more shots as Rozario stumbled back.
Rozario was pronounced dead at the scene. The entire encounter took two minutes.
The department would not discuss Alongi’s disability pension, approved by the New York Police Pension Fund Board on May 18. Disability pensions provide recipients with payments equal to three-quarters of their last year’s salary, rather than 50% for regular pensions. The fund’s medical board must determine that the disability was job related, but NYPD spokespersons did not respond to questions about the specific line-of-duty event cited to justify Alongi’s three-quarters payout.
The department said that, since discovering the failure to notify CCRB about Alongi’s retirement request, officials have revamped their review of disability pension applications “related to CCRB matters to ensure that a failure of this sort does not occur again.”
Now there are two layers of review — a supervisor who communicates directly with CCRB and a review by the Department Advocate, an internal NYPD office responsible for prosecuting disciplinary cases against uniformed and civilian members of the department.
The Department Advocate will now personally notify CCRB’s executive director and chief prosecutor of any retirement application by a cop with pending CCRB matters, then personally make sure the retirement application is tabled to give CCRB time to move forward with their case.
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