Jury Selection Begins In Criminal Trial Against Former Middletown School Board Member Joe Fitzgerald

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Jury selection began Tuesday as the criminal trial against former Middletown school board member Joseph "Joe" Fitzgerald is about to get underway.

Fitzgerald is the former member of the Middletown school board who was arrested in June 2025 and was charged with six illegal gun crimes.

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Fitzgerald has always denied all the allegations and criminal charges against him, and he never accepted any plea deals that may have been offered by the Monmouth County Prosecutor. (A spokesman for Prosecutor Raymond Santiago said Tuesday he could not confirm or deny if the prosecutor offered Fitzgerald any plea deals.)

That's why Fitzgerald's case is now headed to a criminal trial.

The first step is jury selection, and that could take several weeks.

Prosecutors say that on the evening of June 30, 2025, Fitzgerald was headed to confront the husband of a woman he was allegedly having an affair with. He had a loaded gun and other weapons in his truck. Before he left the house that evening, Fitzgerald told his wife, whom he is now separated from, he was "going to take care of this right now," referring to the other woman's husband, prosecutors say. His wife called the other man to warn him that Fitzgerald was headed to his home and that he was armed, as she noticed guns missing from the safe in their bedroom. His ex-wife also called the police.

When Atlantic Highlands Police and Middletown Police stopped Fitzgerald's signature blue pick-up truck (with an American flag on it) that evening, they found multiple weapons inside the truck, including a loaded Ruger pistol, a knife, a brass knuckle-style impact stun gun and a homemade dart gun. (The car stop took place very close to Fitzgerald's home on Lakeside Drive.)

After police found the guns, Fitzgerald was arrested at the scene by Middletown Police and charged with five counts of unlawful possession of a weapon, and one count of possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose.

Fitzgerald is arguing his innocence on the grounds of his Second Amendment right as an American to own guns. He hired a somewhat well-known Second Amendment rights lawyer to defend him: Evan Nappen, who has a law office in Eatontown. On his website Nappen describes himself as a lawyer who "dedicated his career to defending 'law-abiding criminals' who become trapped by New Jersey's harsh and unforgiving gun laws."

The lawyer representing Fitzgerald during jury selection Tuesday is Ali Homayouni, an associate in Nappen's law firm. You can read Homayouni's lawyer profile here.

Nappen previously told Patch in this August 2025 article that intends to defend Fitzgerald's case as a gun-rights issue, and he will argue Fitzgerald has a legal right to own all the firearms found in his pick-up truck that evening.

"But this isn't just a firearms law issue. There are plenty of criminal due-process issues (in Fitzgerald's arrest), as well," Nappen said in that 2025 article. "Let's take a look at the guns he was charged with possessing. A lot of them have been miscategorized in a very pejorative way. For example, a spring gun. What is that? It's very vague. And that's just one example. Can police overcharge someone? Can police file charges where they are treading into ground they don't even understand and let the courts sort it out later? Of course, yes."

Fitzgerald's lawyers previously said in court that when Middletown Police first started asking him questions that evening — while he sat in the driver's seat of his pick-up — that he told them he had a pistol in the truck, and he also told them he did not have a permit to carry that pistol.

Fitzgerald said he took all those weapons out of the safe that evening and drove off because his wife was acting very "erratic" and he did not want her to harm herself.

Fitzgerald also previously denied having an affair.

"There was no affair. This was a domestic issue," he said in 2025. "The police report clearly states I was headed home."

There is body-camera footage of Fitzgerald's arrest. However, Middletown Police previously said they will not be releasing it because it is part of the ongoing criminal case.

Fitzgerald has been out of jail since his arrest. Even after he was arrested and temporarily banned from attending school board meetings, Fitzgerald ran for re-election last fall to the Middletown school board. He lost, having received the fewest number of votes out of all seven candidates (5,527 votes) (source: Nov. 4, 2025 election results from the Monmouth County Clerk).

This article (it's very long) is a transcript of what was said at Fitzgerald's first court hearing after his arrest. It details the prosecution's case against Fitzgerald, their account of what happened that night and his alleged extramarital affair, and it also has the response from his lawyers: Read The Transcript Of Joe Fitzgerald's First Court Hearing, As His Criminal Case Proceeds (Sept. 2025)