The police chief of Springdale Borough drew civil and criminal complaints and was terminated earlier in his career. Now, video raises new questions about his handling of controversy over the Western Pennsylvania borough’s cooperation with ICE.

By Charlie Wolfson | Photos by Stephanie Strasburg
Aug. 4, 2026

Police Chief Derek Dayoub watched from his usual seat at the far end of the dais as William “Danny” Rosenmund began speaking during public comment at Springdale Borough’s April 21 council meeting.

After Rosenmund had spoken for about two minutes, saying the borough’s 2025 agreement to work with ICE violated open meetings laws, Dayoub gestured and spoke to council members and then looked toward two armed police officers standing in the back of the room. The officers immediately walked up the center aisle.

The subsequent arrest did not go smoothly. As Rosenmund tried to remain at the podium, the officers threw him to the ground and Dayoub rose from his seat to assist them in restraining him on the ground. 

Borough officials said Rosenmund spoke for more than the allotted three minutes when he was approached by officers, which the video contradicts. The full-length video can be found on Public Source’s YouTube.

The public arrest of a critic and the criminal proceedings against Rosenmund came as Dayoub and Springdale’s elected leaders face growing scrutiny over the borough’s 287(g) agreement to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Public Source examined Dayoub’s history and found repeated allegations of violence, intimidation and misconduct spanning nearly two decades — much of it publicly available before borough leaders hired and promoted him. 

The record stretches from Dayoub’s years as an officer in Washington County through his arrival in Springdale in 2013 and promotion to chief in 2022. 

Before that promotion, he had faced:

• Multiple civil lawsuits alleging excessive force, harassment and false charges, some of which ended in settlements
• Criminal assault charges — later dropped — stemming from an encounter with a teenage fast-food worker
• A Protection from Abuse Order granted after a former partner accused him of physical abuse, threats and online harassment
• Firing from a Washington County police department, whose chief wrote in a termination letter that he “falsified” a police report. 

A former Springdale police chief wrote in a civil complaint against the borough in 2016 that Dayoub, then an officer, had engaged in a “pattern of habitual insubordinate conduct and conduct unbecoming an officer” and that he recommended the borough terminate his employment. 

After he did not respond to several interview requests, Public Source emailed Dayoub a list of the allegations described in this story and asked for his response. He approached two reporters at the end of a borough council meeting to say that the allegations were “150% incorrect.”

“Just because you look at stuff that was alleged, nothing was sustained,” he said. He urged the reporters to “dig a little more,” but when asked to elaborate, he repeatedly said, “It’s your job to find out, not mine.”

Thirteen years into Dayoub’s time working for Springdale, several current and former residents now say fear of retaliation suppresses criticism and discourages complaints. More than a dozen people contacted for this story refused to speak on the record, saying they feared retaliation.

“People don’t talk because they’re afraid of the repercussions,” said former council member Brittni Bair. “I have a camera on my phone every time I drive through Springdale.”

Bair recently moved to nearby New Kensington, but was on council when Dayoub was made chief. She voted to approve that promotion in 2022.

If she could do it over, Bair said, “I would very, very, very much advocate against making him the chief of police.” She said she has since learned more about the allegations made against him in lawsuits over the years.

Civil complaints in Washington, Allegheny counties

Dayoub ended his tenure as an officer in a Washington County township under a cloud of complaints.

One plaintiff, John J. Dvorsak, wrote in a 2009 civil lawsuit that Dayoub used force against him unprovoked when he arrived at a scene where Dayoub had detained his son in Smith Township.

“He just come after me like a wild man,” Dvorsak alleged during a deposition. “… He kept on pounding my head into the van. I broke the tail light lens out with my head … I was in so much pain. I thought he was going to kill me.”

Dvorsak could not be located to seek comment. 

He said in the deposition that Dayoub “pulled this mace out and just kept on spraying … I counted seven times he sprayed … I couldn’t see two feet in front of me.”

Dvorsak said the beating came a couple months after Dayoub pulled him over for a minor traffic infraction and told Dvorsak, “You better straighten your attitude up.”

Smith Township and Dvorsak settled the case for $35,000, according to documents obtained via Pennsylvania’s public records law.

Smith Township, which surrounds Burgettstown, paid another $10,000 to an Ohio woman named Kristy Booker, who filed a 2009 lawsuit alleging excessive force and false charges stemming from a 2008 police encounter after a Dave Matthews Band concert. 

According to the complaint, Booker and a companion were stopped for “swerving,” handcuffed, taken to the Burgettstown police station and then released.

After Booker inadvertently left the station with an officer’s cell phone, Booker alleged that another officer threw her against a wall and Dayoub slammed the man she was with to the ground. The lawsuit alleges that the officers then falsely charged the couple with stealing an officer’s phone, resisting arrest and aggravated assault. 

The officers wrote in a criminal affidavit that the couple were the aggressors in the encounter. The charges were dropped when Dayoub and the other officer were unavailable to testify in court.

In 2010, a lawsuit alleged that in Smith Township, Dayoub tackled plaintiff Kenneth Porchiran, unprovoked, stomped on his face and tasered him. Both parties agreed to the dismissal of that case, for reasons that aren’t clear in available records.

Another lawsuit alleged that from 2012 to 2015, Dayoub and three Cheswick officers engaged in a pattern of detaining, questioning and intimidating a Cheswick man named Joshua Sandusky, targeting him “because of his ADHD,” as the plaintiff alleged in the complaint. The case settled, and Sandusky received $5,000.

Dayoub disputed the allegations in all of the above cases in a July conversation with Public Source.

A criminal charge likewise stopped short of trial. Dayoub was charged with simple assault after an incident at a Burgettstown McDonald’s in October 2008. According to a criminal complaint, Dayoub grabbed a teenaged McDonald’s employee, squeezing a pressure point and causing him to collapse. During a suspension, Dayoub wrote in a letter seeking benefits from the Unemployment Compensation Board of Review that the accusation had “no validity.”

The criminal charges were dropped in 2011 after Dayoub cooperated with a grand jury investigation into police corruption, according to a news report at the time. Steven Toprani, then the Washington County district attorney, said Dayoub had been helping his office and petitioned for his charges to be dropped. Toprani, now in private law practice, declined to comment for this story.

Dayoub filed a 2012 lawsuit alleging he was discriminated against for his Syrian ancestry and that Toprani and a detective conspired to coerce alleged victims and arrest him without probable cause. Court documents show the suit was resolved out of court and dismissed in 2015.

By that time, Dayoub had been fired from Smith Township. Public Source received documents related to that termination in response to a public records request to the township. In February 2013, a man escaped from a holding cell in the township police building. Dayoub wrote in an affidavit that the man damaged the cell door by “bending the cage,” but in a dismissal letter the township police chief wrote that there was no damage and the man “walked out of the cage and shut the cage door.” 

Dayoub began as a part-time officer in Springdale that same year, and the borough council made him a full-time officer that October.

In 2016, Julio Medeiros, who served as Springdale police chief from 2013 to 2015, filed a civil complaint against the borough, noting a string of formal complaints coming against Dayoub from the public, some of which “may have risen to the level of criminal conduct.”

Medeiros declined to comment for this story. The suit was settled and Medeiros received $225,000 from the borough to cover back pay, pain and suffering and legal fees.

In May 2020, while Dayoub was a Springdale cop but before he led the department, a woman lodged a Protection From Abuse order, or PFA, against him.

In the civil petition, the woman alleged that Dayoub, who she had been dating, abused her physically and online.

Dayoub’s lawyer told WPXI at the time that the allegations were “probably the weakest” he’d seen.

“He was mad at me because I would not show him my chest, he would press the pressure point between my thumb and index finger and I would drop to my knees,” she wrote in the petition, obtained by Public Source from the Department of Court Records. She said she discovered Dayoub was married in 2019 and tried to break up with him, “and he’s gone berzerk since then.

“He has probably 5 or 6 fake Facebook accounts where he slanders me,” she wrote. “He puts pictures of my daughter on these accounts. He puts my medical history on there … he sends emails out pretending to be me … He fills out forms for substance abuse facilities with my contact information.

“I believe that he’s going to kill me. He said that if I ever try to ruin his life, I will be drinking through a straw for the rest of my life,” she wrote.

The woman, whose name Public Source is withholding, declined to comment.

A judge granted the petition for the PFA and eventually extended a no-contact order against Dayoub for two years. 

‘He was trying to scare me’

The chief’s recent critics have, by and large, not filed formal complaints, but some point to video documentation.

In the immediate aftermath of Rosenmund’s April arrest, bystander cell phone footage shows Dayoub shouting at Rosenmund’s wife, Katy Ockree, and warning her against going to the hospital where her husband was being taken in an ambulance. “You show up down there, you’re going to jail,” Dayoub said to Ockree. 

Two days after the arrest, a statement was published on the borough website, signed “Springdale Borough Mayor and Council.” It alleged that Rosenmund refused to stop speaking after a three-minute time limit had expired. Building surveillance video, made public a month later, showed that was untrue: Rosenmund had been speaking for just over two minutes when police began to move him. 

Rosenmund was charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, obstructing government and other counts, and awaits an Aug. 5 preliminary hearing before the local magistrate. The borough elected officials never made another statement after their original explanation was contradicted by video. Mayor Joel Anderson and all seven council members did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

The scene that unfolded by the ambulance was not Ockree’s first encounter with Dayoub. 

Dayoub and another officer pulled her over in 2014 after she ran a red light. The other officer wrote in an affidavit attached to a criminal complaint that Ockree left the scene without permission, drove at high speeds and ran stop signs before stopping at her home, where officers drew their guns because Ockree was rifling through her purse.

Ockree said in a recent interview that she pulled over and nobody got out of the police car, which she thought was actually an EMS vehicle. She disputes the allegation that she broke any traffic laws on her way home. 

“They got out and they were pointing their guns at me,” she said. “When I told them I thought they were EMS, they said, ‘Well, don’t you know what color police lights are?’ and I said, ‘No.’”

She was charged with two counts of reckless endangerment, among other charges, and took a plea deal on the advice of a lawyer who said she wouldn’t win going against the word of the police without any witnesses. She did community service, paid a fine and got three points on her license.

Years later, she said, Dayoub followed her in his car through the borough building parking lot while she was dropping off recycling and threatened to charge her with disturbing the peace and jail her. She said the encounter left her shaken and feeling that he was trying to intimidate her. “He was trying to scare me,” she said.

Asked to respond to this account and others described in this story, Dayoub said the allegations are “complete bogus.”

A third encounter happened in 2021, Ockree said, when she drove into the Sheetz in nearby Cheswick to get snacks and fill her gas tank. She saw Dayoub in his car, and as she was leaving, she said she “gave him the middle finger because at this point, I’m just tired of being harassed by him.”

She drove home from Sheetz, unaware that Dayoub would be there shortly. Dayoub arrived about two minutes after she did, she said, and encountered her husband, Rosenmund, in the yard. After an exchange, she said he told Rosenmund, “You tell her if she pulls that shit again, she’s going to get arrested.”

Rosenmund promptly emailed the mayor, writing that Dayoub “followed my wife home from Cheswick to make a threat against her” in one of “numerous encounters.” Ockree emailed then-Chief George Polnar to file a formal complaint about Dayoub. Polnar responded, outlining the process for making a complaint and noting that, “Should any part of the allegation be proven false, you would open yourself up to criminal charges.” 

Ockree didn’t go through with the complaint, in part because she was already dealing with the criminal charges stemming from her first run-in with Dayoub. “I know that’s just a tactic, something that they say, I would assume, to discourage dissent, but it felt very real because I had been there before,” she said.

Polnar told Public Source that Dayoub was helpful to him in his four-year stint as chief and that he observed no evidence of “ill behavior” by Dayoub during that time.

On-record complaints are rare

Ockree’s decision not to pursue her complaint reflects a broader pattern residents described: fear that speaking up could bring further scrutiny or retaliation.

Another Springdale resident, Tony Mator, said his experience interacting with Dayoub shows the difficulty facing any resident who wants accountability.

Mator wrote in a complaint to the borough in 2022 that his son, who has autism and was then 13, was stopped by Dayoub as he was walking alone and was asked to identify himself. The boy hesitated and asked Dayoub why he wanted to know, Mator wrote. 

“This made him angry. He chewed out my son for a little while and then ordered him to go home for absolutely no discernable reason,” Mator said in a recent interview. 

“I was supposed to meet with the chief” about the incident, Mator said — the result of sending a one-page letter to then-chief Polnar describing the incident. “When I got [to the department], no one was answering. Eventually Derek pulled up in his car … said something along the lines of, ‘No, I’m not going to let you see the chief,’” and drove away, Mator said in the interview.

In April, 40-year-old Springdale man Ian Hill made Facebook posts criticizing borough leadership and urging residents to pressure council members for change. He wrote, “Let them know that they, too, are touchable. They have addresses. Loved ones. Kids. Pets. All of which are entirely within the scope of tragedy when they force violence upon you.” He wrote one post “asking for the Springdale police chief’s address,” according to a police affidavit.

Springdale police charged Hill with terroristic threats, referring to the Facebook posts, and at the same time charged him with simple assault for an incident that happened 10 weeks prior. Police accused him of threatening and assaulting a man at a February protest about the borough’s involvement with ICE. Witnesses, photo and video evidence show Hill carrying a stick but not striking anyone. A counterprotester, who was not charged, is seen hitting another person.

A civil rights attorney told Public Source after Hill’s arrest that the Facebook posts did not clear the legal threshold for a “true threat,” and an official from the ACLU of Pennsylvania said the lengthy delay between the protest incident and the related charges could support a claim that those charges were retaliatory. The Allegheny County District Attorney’s office withdrew all of the charges at a June 3 preliminary hearing.

To David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh professor and expert on policing, Rosenmund’s council meeting arrest helps explain the reluctance to speak up that residents described.

“What you’re seeing is evidence of people feeling intimidated,” Harris said. “When you [have a] person speaking up in a borough council meeting and they get arrested, that sends a message all by itself. When you have a very tight, small area with a police department and people know each other, it may lend itself to that kind of atmosphere where people are thinking, ‘I don’t want to get involved.’”

‘I should have questioned more’

It’s unclear whether the Springdale officials who hired and then promoted Dayoub reviewed the public records. Many people involved in the decisions are either dead or declined to talk.

At least one borough official raised concerns about Dayoub’s past at the time of his hire in 2013. 

Then-Councilor John Molnar said the series of allegations “seems to be a pattern.” 

“The concern is the amount of them,” Molnar said, according to TribLIVE. “It’s not like it’s one or two.” 

One member, Jason Fry, told the Trib at the time that the council didn’t know about the allegations when Dayoub was hired part-time. Fry declined to comment this month on the matter for this story. Molnar died in 2022.

Eileen Miller was mayor at the time and told Public Source that Dayoub “challenged” her authority when he was a part-time officer but then added that she didn’t “want any repercussions” for her comments. She ended the phone call when a reporter asked for more detail.

In 2015, council voted to make Dayoub the acting chief of police. Of the members who voted in favor, three are dead and one, Jason Overly, is still on council. He did not respond to requests for comment. Voting against were Fry and James Zurisko, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Dayoub was acting chief until 2018, when Polnar was hired as the full-time chief.

In 2022, after Polnar’s retirement, two council members at the time voted against promoting Dayoub to chief: Shawn Fitzgerald, who did not respond to a request for comment, and Antoinette Robbins, who declined to comment. 

One former council member who voted to approve his promotion said she regrets the choice now.

“At that time, I felt he was the right candidate,” Brittni Bair said. “As time moved on and I learned how his behaviors and demeanors were, I started digging myself and I found several incidents … that Chief Dayoub has had aggression issues.”

She said she has had “several concerning incidents” directly with Dayoub but declined to go into detail.

“I should have questioned more” before voting to make Dayoub chief, she said. 

Inconsistent information about officers’ pasts is a widespread problem in law enforcement, Pitt’s David Harris said.

He said Springdale officials may not have known about Dayoub’s past because the incidents predated a 2020 law that created a database and a requirement for municipalities to share such information. Even if they did know, cash-strapped municipalities sometimes overlook candidates’ histories to get a trained, experienced officer.

Officers “who don’t have a clear record simply, when the fire gets hot, they move to another department, and usually will go to a department strapped for personnel,” Harris said.

A TribLIVE report on Dayoub’s promotion to chief in 2022 noted he received a four-year contract in September 2022. This July, two council members gave Public Source conflicting information about whether it has since been renewed, while the council president and the mayor did not respond to questions about Dayoub’s contract. The borough has not responded to a request made under Pennsylvania’s open records law for Dayoub’s current contract.

Ockree said her encounters with Dayoub were interspersed with countless more benign reminders of the power that the chief wields in the borough of 0.9 square miles, where patrols can feel constant.

As her husband awaits the resolution of his criminal charges, Ockree said the couple is torn between the urge to move and their comfort in the house she’s owned for more than a decade. 

“You feel powerless,” she said, “you feel just helpless.”

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Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.

​​Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with Public Source who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org or on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg.

This story was edited by Rich Lord and Halle Stockton and fact-checked by Maddy Franklin. 

Design and development by Natasha Khan.

This story was made possible by donations to our independent, nonprofit newsroom.

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