Former Middletown BOE Member Joe Fitzgerald Acquitted Of All Crimes

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — A jury of 12 people on Monday found former Middletown school board member Joseph "Joe" Fitzgerald not guilty of all criminal charges filed against him.

Fitzgerald was arrested in June 2025, and charged with eight crimes, for illegal possession of items including a handgun, a kitchen knife and a Taser. The jury's decision acquitted him of all charges, confirmed a spokesman for Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond Santiago.

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"I am grateful for the not-guilty verdict, and I am truly happy to finally put this chapter of my life behind me," Fitzgerald told Patch Wednesday. "This has been a challenging and emotional experience for me, my family and everyone who has stood by me throughout this process. I am thankful to those who supported me, believed in me and allowed the legal process to run its course ... I look forward to moving forward with my life, and more importantly my children."

The night he was arrested

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 denies having an affair.) He had a loaded handgun 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 allegedly going to confront him, and he was armed, as she noticed guns missing from their bedroom safe. She also called 911.

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

Fitzgerald was arrested at the scene by Middletown Police and charged with unlawful possession of a weapon (for having a handgun without a permit), possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and six other counts of illegal weapons possession.

The trial

The criminal trial against Fitzgerald started Tuesday, Oct. 20 and ended with the jury's unanimous not-guilty decision on Monday. The jury was made up of five women and seven men, all Monmouth County residents, said Fitzgerald's lawyer, Ali Homayouni.

Jury selection was held on Tuesday, and the trial started Wednesday.

Fitzgerald said before the case went to trial, he was offered a plea deal from the Monmouth County Prosecutor: The state asked that he plead guilty and serve one year in prison, instead of three years+ he was facing.

Fitzgerald turned it down, and decided to try his luck at a jury trial. He is a former U.S. Marine and was elected twice to the Middletown school board; he was at one time very popular in Middletown.

Was he ever scared he would go to prison?

"Yeah," Fitzgerald immediately replied on Wednesday. "When this first started — when I was first arrested and met with the prosecutors — they told me no prison on this, and I was looking at PTI (pre-trial intervention, the common punishment for first-time offenders in New Jersey. Pre-trial intervention does not include jail time). My estimation was we were headed to PTI. I wasn't worried about it ... I said if I ended up getting a felony, I can get it expunged."

"The very next meeting there was a new prosecutor assigned to the case," he said. "And a new judge. That's when they said we're looking at a three-and-a-half-year mandatory Graves Act prison term. We said no way. They came back a month later and said one year. They gave me a week to consider it. I said no, I can't do it; I'm the sole provider for my children. I turned it down. And here we are. I knew I was innocent. But I had to prove it."

Fitzgerald hired the law firm of Evan Nappen and his associate attorney, Homayouni, who argued the case on the grounds of Fitzgerald's Second Amendment rights to own guns.

When he was stopped that night, Fitzgerald told Middletown Police he had a handgun in his truck, and that he did not have a permit for it on him.

Homayouni argued, successfully, that Fitzgerald legally owned all the guns and weapons he was found with that evening, and that it was emergency circumstances that caused him to leave the house that night without the handgun permit.

"I was just doing my job," said Homayouni.

Fitzgerald says he removed all the weapons from the safe that evening because he was scared his wife, with whom he had been arguing over the alleged affair, was going to harm herself.

"In New Jersey, you need a permit to buy a gun, but then you can have it in your home without a permit," said Nappen. "The law allows for possession of firearms in one's home without a permit or ID card. You can even go to the shooting range with the gun, and come back home, or take it hunting and come back to your home. You can do all that without the necessity of having a firearms license on you."

He said his client just "put everything in the car that night and left," leaving the handgun permit behind.

Fitzgerald said he thinks Middletown Police "overcharged me to scare me."

The Middletown Police officers who arrested Fitzgerald that night, plus Fitzgerald's wife, the man he was allegedly headed to confront and that man's wife all testified for the prosecution.

For the defense, Fitzgerald's best friend testified and Fitzgerald himself took the stand.

"He took the stand because he was confident in the actions he took that night," said Nappen. "So, the jury heard directly from him."

Fitzgerald said he and his wife are still legally married, but intend to divorce. The other man and his wife are also divorcing, the husband testified on the stand.

He and the other woman were not having an affair, he said. He said he and she are very close friends, and the two often talked at that time about the proposed closure of two Middletown schools, something she was very concerned about and something he, as a school board member, was against.

He said his wife became convinced the two were having an affair, and she angrily confronted him that night. He also said he had no intentions of harming the other man, who he said was in New York that evening and was not even home.

He said he planned to go to the other man's house that night "to figure out what the h- is going on."

Fitzgerald and his lawyers both credited that it was a jury trial that resulted in him being acquitted of all charges. He requested to have a jury trial, instead of a bench trial, which is a trial before a judge.

"I think a lot of people would understand there's a human element here," said Fitzgerald. "The law is black and white but jurors see grey. Jurors can understand how things escalate."

"This is why we have jury trials," said Nappen. "You have a right to a jury trail where your peers, your fellow citizens, are able to hear the evidence and weigh the facts. That's a special right we all treasure in America and our founding fathers knew this. That's why they put it in the Bill of Rights, because of the injustices people endured in England — where one single judge just did the king's bidding."

"You don't get the privilege of a jury trial in authoritarian or communist countries," he said.

Fitzgerald also said he was acting out of concern for his wife that night, and his military training taught him to remove all the guns when he thinks someone could hurt themselves.

"I believe this situation highlights a larger issue regarding how our veterans are treated in society. As a Marine veteran, I find it troubling that people may be more willing to assume that a Marine is suffering from PTSD than to consider that his actions may have been influenced by the training and experiences that shaped him during his military service," he said. "Our veterans deserve to be understood as individuals, and their actions should be considered fairly and in their proper context rather than through assumptions and stereotypes."

"This experience has also reinforced my concerns about the importance of protecting our constitutional rights, including the Second Amendment," he said. "New Jersey's strict firearms laws can place significant burdens on lawful gun owners, creating complex legal requirements that can have serious consequences for individuals and families."

He also said the media did not do a fair job covering the charges against him.

"While I respect the legal process, I believe there are important lessons to be learned about fairness, responsible reporting, the protection of constitutional rights, and the way we treat those who have served our country. I ask that the media and the public respect the privacy of all families involved as we move forward."

Fitzgerald said he paid all his own legal fees.

"Legal services are always costly, it's just a fact of our system," said Nappen.

Fitzgerald currently lives in Red Bank. He still has his house on Lakeside Drive in Middletown, which he said he's "considering" what to do with.

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