White River Junction -- Hartford police are investigating an allegation that one of their officers pushed a woman headfirst into the pavement outside the Shady Lawn Motel earlier this month, sending her to the hospital with a laceration, concussion and other injuries after she had called them for help.

Monica Therrien, 37, whom both police and witnesses described as intoxicated, had called 911 on the night of Sept. 10 to report possible domestic abuse, Hartford Police Chief Glenn Cutting said. No evidence was found to support her complaint, but Therrien ended up on the ground bleeding from the head after a frustrated exchange with the officer, John Adams.

The incident happened as nearly a dozen motel residents watched. Several of them, along with Therrien's boyfriend, Dennis Kucera, gave the Valley News similar accounts of Therrien's interactions with police.

Therrien spent much of the past two weeks in and out of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center with several injuries, including a concussion, a partially collapsed lung and bruised ribs, according to medical records Therrien showed the Valley News.

Therrien said the injuries resulted from her encounter with police.

Witnesses told the Valley News that Adams slammed Therrien to the ground after she did nothing more than walk away from him. While she lay on the ground bleeding from the head and apparently unconscious, witnesses said, Adams handcuffed her while several officers on the scene told onlookers to go inside their rooms.

“I didn't threaten the cops, I didn't holler at them or do anything,” Therrien, who was discharged from DHMC on Tuesday, said in an interview. “I was just walking across the parking lot. It's ridiculous. They could have grabbed my arms and stopped me.”

Police say they are in the early stages of their review of Adams' actions, but denied much of the account offered by witnesses and Therrien. In an interview, Cutting said that Therrien fell when Adams reached out to stabilize her, and denied that she was ever unconscious. However, Cutting declined to share with the Valley News the tapes, reports written by officers on the scene, or any other records of the incident, saying he could not make public evidence in an ongoing investigation.

“I find it hard to believe an officer is going to purposely assault her in front of everybody,” Cutting said. “We'll look at it, but that doesn't make sense to me.”

Cutting also wondered why some of Therrien's injuries were apparently not diagnosed until days after the incident, and said they may have been inflicted after her encounter with police. The police, Cutting said on Thursday, are investigating whether Kucera caused some of the injuries, or if Therrien fell on her own days after police arrived, allegations that Kucera and Therrien both strongly deny.

Late Friday, two weeks after the incident, Hartford police arrested Kucera and charged him with domestic assault. In an interview, Cutting declined to provide details until they are made part of a public court file tomorrow.

Cutting said Therrien had suffered a head laceration in her encounter with police. Asked if police had concluded that Kucera had caused the other injuries to Therrien, the chief said that was still under investigation. “We're still trying to sort out the injury thing.”

The chief declined to make Adams, a Hartford police officer since 2006, available for comment.

Questions about the encounter come as Hartford is contending with other complaints of excessive force or overzealous enforcement by its police officers. The most prominent of those involves a lawsuit brought against the town by the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union seeking police records of a Memorial Day weekend incident in which officers allegedly pepper-sprayed and handcuffed an unresponsive black man inside his home. The Vermont Attorney General is reviewing police actions in that case.

In the Sept. 10 incident, Therrien called police around 9:30 p.m. to report that Kucera had subjected her to a domestic assault, Cutting said. Five police officers arrived on the scene in three cruisers, and Adams took charge.

The Valley News spoke with several motel residents, all of whom offered similar accounts of the incident. Three residents, Charles Stickney, 20, Susan Johnson, 29, and Brenda Hutchins, 47, say they witnessed the entire incident. A fourth resident said he also witnessed the incident, but asked that his name be withheld. Another person, Crystal Butler, 23, said she did not see the initial exchange, but saw events after Therrien hit the parking lot surface.

According to these accounts, Adams spoke to Therrien outside her first-floor room at the motel, while police made Kucera stay inside with two other officers, who came in and out of the room. Therrien was drunk and slurring her words, and had trouble communicating with Adams, witnesses said. At one point, she raised her arms to try to show purported bruises, but officers told her at the scene that there was no evidence of any domestic violence.

“She was trying to tell them that she had bruises on her arms,” Johnson said. “She was getting offended, upset.”

After a few minutes, Therrien grew visibly agitated and began to walk away from Adams quickly, and toward two officers sitting in a police cruiser a few yards away, witnesses said. They said neither Therrien nor the officer had raised their voices, nor had they come into physical contact by that point.

Witnesses said that after Therrien had taken a couple steps, Adams came up behind her, grabbed her at the top of her neck, and threw her to the ground. Therrien hit the pavement with such force that her head bounced up and struck the pavement a second time, witnesses said. Blood spattered, and Therrien appeared to lose consciousness, witnesses said.

“We heard the pop, like a watermelon makes when you smash it on the ground,” said Hutchins.

The onlookers questioned why the officer had to use such force. “All they had to do was run in front of her and stop her,” Johnson said.

While Therrien was on the ground, bleeding from the head, witnesses said Adams knelt down, put his knee in the small of her back, rolled her on her side, pulled her hands behind her back, and handcuffed her.

At this point, the other officers crowded around her. According to witnesses, some of the officers began to yell at the bystanders, telling them to go into their rooms, and saying they were interfering with “police procedure.”

“They were just standing over her and then looked up and saw all of us and said, ‘Go in, there's nothing to see,' ” Johnson said.

After several minutes, an ambulance arrived and took Therrien to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Some of the officers on the scene cleaned the pool of blood with rags, witnesses said, though Johnson took pictures of bloodstains that remained on the pavement the following day. The photographs showed several blood splatters.

Therrien needed six staples in her head to close a large laceration, she said, and returned home on Sept. 11, according to medical records. She told the Valley News that she continued to feel the after-effects of the incident. She said she became dizzy and fainted inside her room the next day, and was hospitalized and diagnosed with a mild concussion. Four days later, on Sept. 16, she returned to the hospital, where doctors found a partially collapsed lung with pneumonia, according to Therrien's medical records.

Therrien said doctors told her that her bruised ribs led to the lung collapse, which eventually gave rise to the pneumonia.

Therrien authorized the Valley News to speak with her doctors, but they were not available for comment last week, DHMC spokesman Rick Adams said.

While at the hospital, Therrien found in her purse a criminal citation saying that she had to appear in court in November to answer to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, Kucera said.

Cutting confirmed that a citation had been issued to Therrien, but said it is “very likely” that the charge will be dropped for lack of evidence. “I don't anticipate that she's going to be charged,” Cutting said. “I question whether she committed a disorderly conduct.”

In an interview, Kucera said he did not harm Therrien, and was mystified about why she called 911. “We're on good terms, there was never an altercation,” Kucera said. “I'm not clear why she called.”

Therrien said she is also unsure why she called. She was drunk, she said, and began having memories of conflicts with previous men. Kucera did nothing wrong, she said.

“I was really confused, I don't know why I called 911,” Therrien said. “I did drink too much, I can't lie about that.”

Cutting said his department launched an internal investigation on Sept. 16, nearly a week after the incident, after Kucera called police to complain. Deputy Chief Leonard Roberts is heading the investigation.

Hartford police cruisers are equipped with video cameras mounted on the dashboard. Cutting said that none of the cameras on the scene was positioned to capture video of the scene, but that two cameras picked up audio recordings.

Cutting said his department is in the early stages of trying to figure out what happened, but he challenged many of the witnesses' contentions.

He said that Adams did not intentionally push Therrien to the ground. Cutting said that as Therrien began to walk away from Adams -- but before she could travel any distance -- Adams reached out to stabilize her out of concern that she was “extremely intoxicated.” In that attempt, Therrien stumbled and fell to the pavement, he said.

“She had turned to run away from him, he reached out to grab her from behind her,” Cutting said. “She fell and hit her head on the pavement.”

While witnesses said that Therrien appeared to be unresponsive after hitting the pavement, Cutting said that audio recordings documented her talking throughout the incident.

“She was talking the whole time,” Cutting said.

The audio recordings did not provide any evidence that officers ordered residents back into their rooms, Cutting said.

Cutting confirmed one part of the witnesses' account: that police handcuffed Therrien while she was on the ground bleeding. The chief said it was standard procedure, to protect both Therrien and the ambulance crew. The handcuffs were removed when the ambulance arrived, Cutting said.

Cutting said officers administered a breathalyzer and found that Therrien had a .287 blood-alcohol level, more than three times the legal driving limit.

The police chief also questioned why Therrien's purported bruised rib and collapsed lung were diagnosed days after the incident. Considering that police were called for a report of domestic violence, Cutting said in an interview before Kucera was arrested, he wondered whether Kucera caused the rib and lung problems.

“I don't know that these injuries (didn't) happen some other way,” Cutting said. “Did Kucera do something to her to put her in the hospital? I don't know. I’m not saying he did, but it makes us wonder. Could that be retaliation for her calling (police)? Is she back in the hospital because he put her there?”

The chief also said that, given Therrien's intoxicated state on Sept. 10, he wondered if she had gotten drunk again and fallen down in subsequent days.

“Did she fall down and cause these injuries to herself?” Cutting said.

Therrien and Kucera, before he was arrested on Friday, both denied the chief's accusations and said Therrien's injuries are due entirely to the encounter with Adams.

“It's totally false,” Therrien said. “I've been here nine months, he's never touched me.”

Adams remains on regular duty, Cutting said.

“The only person I feel threatened by is Officer Adams,” Therrien said.

Stickney, one of the witnesses who spoke to the Valley News, asked the officers at the scene for Adams' name. Adams and several of the officers came to Stickney before leaving that night.

Stickney told the Valley News that he had this brief conversation with Adams: “ ‘You saw her running away, right?' ” Adams said.

“I said, ‘I saw her walking.' I said, ‘I think you could have handled that better.' ”

“He said, ‘You don't do what we do for a living.' ”