Two Fall River police officers who were present at the 2020 beating of a suspect at the city’s police station will be allowed to keep their jobs after an investigation released this week found insufficient evidence to prove they filed false reports in violation of department policy.

An earlier FBI investigation into the brawls already resulted in a prison sentence for Nicholas Hoar, a former Fall River police officer who was found guilty in federal court in February of striking a suspect in the head with a steel baton and filing a false report claiming the suspect fell and hit his head while resisting arrest.

Three other officers present at the incident – Jeffrey Maher, Zachary Vorce and Brendan McNerney – said they did not see what happened. But Maher later retracted his account and became a whistleblower. McNerney and Vorce stuck to their initial statements.

The latest investigation, commissioned by Fall River police, is looking into whether Vorce and McNerney gave false testimony when they claimed they did not see suspect William Harvey injured. Both officers helped transport Harvey to a holding cell shortly before he was hospitalized with a laceration to his head.

“I remember Harvey making a move to kick Officer Hoar. At this point, I was focused on Harvey’s foot,” Vorce wrote in his report of the incident. “I am not sure what happened while they were in the cell, as visibility to the interior of the cell was limited.”

In his own report, McNerney said Hoar apparently pushed Harvey away in self-defense, causing Harvey to stumble.

“When we were in the cell and got Mr. Harvey under control and handcuffed,” McNerney wrote, “we noticed that he was bleeding from a cut on his head. I do not know how he sustained this injury.”

Maher, the whistleblower, testified at Hoar’s federal trial this winter that all three clearly saw Hoar strike Harvey’s head with a steel bat, making a loud noise like “an aluminum bat hitting a baseball,” he said. But Maher said he was the last of the four officers to file a report on the incident, and he felt pressured not to contradict Officers McNerney and Vorce.

“That would have been a very bad situation for all of us,” Maher said, “and they were brand new officers – good officers – and to save their reputations and their jobs, I lied.”

The investigation, led by a consultant called Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting LLC, found that Maher’s statements were not credible or conclusive enough to warrant disciplinary action against McNerney or Vorce, although they formed the basis for a successful federal prosecution.

When the investigator asked Maher in another interview after the trial about what exactly McNerney had seen, he reportedly replied, “I can’t say he definitely saw it. I think he saw it, but… I didn’t look at them. I looked in the cell. I saw them out of the corner of my eye. But why would they close their eyes?”