Skip to content Skip to footer

Norton’s Attorney: Statement About the 2011 Incident

Greg Norton’s Attorney: Norton Spoke With An Officer That Night
April 9 2014

HORNELL, NY – There have been some new developments in the case of former Hornell Police Officer Greg Norton. Norton resigned in September 2011, after a newspaper story indicated Norton failed to act when he was warned that a man was standing on railroad tracks in an apparent suicide attempt.

At that time, the Evening Tribune reported that Norton was working the desk at the police station when Glen Hann of Hornell called the police and said he observed the man standing on the tracks. Later Norton took a police job in Angelica but the officials let him go, reportedly because the Hornell train tracks story caught up with him.

And now, Norton’s attorney says cell phone and Hornell Police telephone record documents from the case prove that Greg Norton was totally innocent of any wrong doing on that night in August 2011, in Hornell. According to Philadelphia attorney/Hornell native Jeff Dailey, the reason that Norton is able to get unemployment from Hornell is because the State’s Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board believes that Norton followed normal police procedure that night. “At the time that the call came in from Mr. Hann on the Hornell Police dispatch line, Officer Norton was on his cell phone with one of the officers who was on the scene of another incident,” said attorney Jeff Dailey, who also says a judge in 2012 said she believed Norton’s case, about trying to tell an officer that someone was on the tracks, before the train came along. “Officer Norton put down his cell phone, took the call from Mr. Hann on the dispatch line. After he finished the call with Mr. Hann, he (Norton) hung up with Mr. Hann and then picked up his cell phone and resumed the call with the officer at the scene of the other incident,” Dailey told WLEA News. Dailey claims to have phone records, both cell phone and police dispatch, to back up that assertion.

We spoke with Hornell Mayor Shawn Hogan who says the only reason that Norton was able to get unemployment money from Hornell, which the state unemployment insurance appeals board ruled last Friday that Norton was entitled to, was because of a technical mistake made by Hornell City Hall in responding to a letter from the appeals board. “Their winning of the unemployment insurance case had nothing to do with the case itself, it was a technicality about the city requesting a reopening of the hearing because we missed the first hearing, because the hearing notice was misaddressed,” Hogan told WLEA News. “It was addressed to city hall, Hornell NY, with no one’s name. So it had nothing to do with the merits of the case, and I’m surprised that an attorney of Mr. Dailey’s stature would even raise that issue or make a public statement.”

Dailey disputes Hogan’s quote, citing a legal document from a judge in 2012, who believed Norton’s story that he did tell a member of the Hornell P.D. that someone was on the tracks, on the night of the alleged suicide attempt in 2011.

We’re told that Greg Norton is now back in school, studying for another career.

Click here to see the decision from 2012.

Click here to read the decision from the New York State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.


Social Share Buttons and Icons powered by Ultimatelysocial