A judge dismissed a charge of obstructing emergency services against a Schuylkill County woman after he found the District Attorney’s office failed to prove a prima facie case against her.
Magisterial District Judge James Reiley did hold a charge of disorderly conduct against Aiyana Brode, 22, of Pottsville, for Schuylkill County Court following a preliminary hearing before him on Monday.
Brode, the manager at the Pizza Hut restaurant along Route 61 in Pottsville, was accused of causing a disturbance and getting in the way of emergency services tending to a two-vehicle crash on the highway back on Aug. 19.
Representing herself at the preliminary hearing, Brode told Reiley that her primary goal at the scene was to have a firetruck moved five feet to allow customers a way to keep the parking lot to the restaurant open, at least in one direction. She said it was not her intent to cause a scene, as she was accused of doing by emergency personnel who testified, including Pottsville Police Ofc. Bryce Dragna and Fire Duty Chief Stephen Messina.
Dragna told Reiley that Brode was “walking through the scene” and began yelling at him as he tried to explain the situation.
“She began yelling, causing a disturbance,” he said. “I tried but she wasn’t listening to me. She was talking over me.”
Messina testified that he’d been dealing with a “disturbance” in the parking lot of the Pizza Hut until Dragna arrived. He said someone had approached the driver of one of the firetrucks at the scene to get them to move it. Though he didn’t hear the entire conversation, Messina described it as having “some obscenities in there.”
“I wanted to explain to you what was going on. We didn’t want to interrupt the Pizza Hut,” he said, adding that it was the goal to keep one side of the parking lot open so people could get out.
While trying to make the case to Reiley that the charge that was ultimately dismissed should be held over for court, Senior Deputy District Attorney Jen Foose told the judge, “They feel like they’ve done nothing wrong.”
Brode told a different story of the incident and explained that she wasn’t intentionally yelling at Dragna or any other first responder at the scene, just trying to speak over firetrucks.
She also said that when Dragna informed her that she could face criminal charges for disrupting the active emergency scene, she went inside the Pizza Hut and locked the door. Brode also told Reiley that she believes she was within her rights to yell back at Dragna after she claimed he yelled at her.
“If the officer is going to curse at me, I’m going to curse right back,” she said in her closing argument.
Prior to getting to the scene, Brode said she arrived at the scene after being notified of the crash by the manager on duty at Pizza Hut. She said she walked from her home on N. 2nd St. and walked all the way around the scene to avoid getting in the way.
When she arrived, she said, someone told her that emergency personnel were just waiting for tow trucks to arrive to take away the vehicles involved in the crash, one of which was in the Pizza Hut parking lot and another on the roadway.
She said a firefighter told her she couldn’t cross the scene to access the restaurant, which forced her to walk around to get to the store.
Brode called a witness during the hearing who corroroborated her side of the story.
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