He weighs more than 500 pounds, but that wasn’t enough to tip the scales of justice for ex-cop Paul Soto.
The rotund retiree lost his legal argument that it was a line-of-duty fall outside a doctor’s office that cost him his NYPD career. A judge says it was actually his “morbid obesity.”
“There’s no dispute that [Soto] is physically incapable of performing his duties as a police officer. He is morbidly obese, suffers from narcolepsy and is hypertensive,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische wrote in her decision made public yesterday.
“Mr. Soto was put on desk duty for his own safety,” and “was not any less able to perform his duties after the fall than he was before it.”
“We’re disappointed,” said Soto’s lawyer, Philip Seelig, who’d been fighting to get his client a big-bucks accidental disability pension from the department.
He currently receives ordinary disability retirement benefits, which pay an officer a taxable pension of half his salary. An accidental disability retirement pays a nontaxable pension of three-fourths his salary.
Seelig said his corpulent client’s career came to an end in March 2005, when “he was trying to navigate around a pallet” outside of an NYPD doctor’s office, fell and hurt his knee.
The pension board didn’t swallow that argument, noting that he had earlier put in retirement papers claiming disabilities related to “morbid obesity.”
They blamed the problems with his knee on his excessive weight – a finding Seelig said was “arbitrary and capricious.” Gische found the board had weighed all the facts.
When Soto joined the force in 1993, Gische found, he weighed approximately 250 pounds. He is now 40, 5-foot-7 and over 500 pounds.
A former colleague at the 6th Precinct said Soto’s gun belt was an incredible 6 feet long, and his bosses would order him to take walks around the stationhouse for his own good. They would also have other officers shadow him to make sure he didn’t pick up food along the way, he said.
Another former co-worker said he was “a sweetheart of a guy” who always got Christmas gifts for the stationhouse, including a TV for the lounge. “The job was his whole family,” he said.
At his East Houston Street apartment building, neighbors called him big-hearted.
“He’s a very nice guy. He gives everybody chocolate at Christmas,” said Natalie NuÑez, 16.
Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton and Erika Martinez