Return of the Chief: Stacey Williams to resume Roselle Police leadership

He is coming back on Tuesday morning.

Stacey Williams will walk into police headquarters. He will sit in the chief’s chair. The courts have said he can. The Civil Service Commission has said he must. A judge with a cold eye for the truth has already shredded the case against him and called it what it was: a political lynching, a sham, a hit job dressed up in the cheap suit of official procedure.

The only question now is whether the petty tyrants who run this town will try one more cheap trick to stop him. Mayor Donald Shaw and his shadow, Denise Wilkerson, have until Tuesday morning to find another way to cheat. They have used up all the others. The courts have run out of patience.

This story begins with a joke. Not a funny one. A crass one. A word Williams should not have used, said years ago in a private conversation among people who knew him. That was the excuse. The real reason was something else entirely: power. Williams would not bend the knee. He would not let Shaw and Wilkerson run his department like a political clubhouse. And in Roselle, that is a hanging offense.

So they fired him. They stripped him of his $210,000-a-year job after 31 years on the force. They installed a captain named Helder Freire, a man whose loyalty to the mayor was never in doubt. They thought that was the end of it.

They were wrong.

Williams fought back. He lawyered up. He took his case to the Civil Service Commission, which threw out his termination and ordered him reinstated. He took it to Administrative Law Judge Thomas R. Betancourt, who delivered a scathing ruling on May 8, 2025, dismissing nearly all the charges and exposing the rot at the heart of Roselle’s government.

“Chief Freire’s testimony seemed to me rehearsed,” Judge Betancourt wrote. “He has much to gain, and much to lose, depending on the final decision in this matter.”

That is how you write a verdict when you have seen the fix, and you are not afraid to name it.

But Shaw and Wilkerson did not give up. They sued. They argued that Williams had filed retirement paperwork under duress and that his departure had left the chief’s position vacant forever. The borough’s lawyer warned of “intolerable uncertainty” if governments could not fill vacancies.

Williams’ lawyer, Patrick Toscano, had the only reply that mattered.

“From day one, Roselle has acted without thinking in this case,” Toscano said, “and acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.”

On April 23, 2026, Superior Court Judge Mark Ciarrocca rejected Roselle’s latest effort to block Williams from returning. The borough had lost again.

This is not a story about a single bad mayor or a single corrupt councilwoman. This is a story about a system that has collapsed entirely.

As we previously reported, Williams was a political lynching victim pushed out of his job over unsubstantiated accusations that the political establishment used to initiate an unjust suspension and apply pressure for his potential termination without a fair and impartial investigation.

NJTODAY initially reported on September 21, 2023, that Williams was secretly suspended with pay in order to head off a potential disclosure of criminal behavior among political insiders. Williams has steadfastly refused to play politics with the case.

The police chief was suspended. The fire chief went out on extended sick leave. The business administrator, the chief financial officer, the superintendent of public works, the building inspector, the zoning officer, the code enforcement supervisor — all gone. Seven lawsuits have been filed by employees over wrongful treatment.

Shaw and Wilkerson are supposed to be Democrats, although job choices like this are supposed to be nonpartisan, but it seems instead they are going out of their way to undermine their own party.

Stacey L. Williams, 57, is registered to vote in Union County and affiliated with the Democratic Party. Helder F. Freire, 44, a Flemington resident, is registered to vote in Hunterdon County and has no political party affiliation.

The current acting borough administrator is Stafford Township Republican Christopher Laba, who two years ago became the 17th chief of the Roselle Fire Department, despite residing in Ocean County, 80 miles away from the borough. Laba is retiring, so his departure will effectively leave Wilkerson in control.

“This has been orchestrated,” former Mayor Christine Dansereau said. “The motive is very basic. Power and greed.”

Dansereau knows something about power. She is openly gay. She worked with Williams for years and never saw a single sign of the bigotry that Shaw’s machine used as a pretext to destroy him. She knows a frame job when she sees one.

And then there is Wilkerson. She is the deputy municipal manager now, a position that pays $130,000 a year despite a glaring lack of qualifications.

She was once the council president, the mayor’s enforcer, the woman who pushed for Williams’ removal because an independent police chief did not fit her vision of a politically controlled department.

She is the Gríma Wormtongue of this sorry drama, the whispering voice that poisons every well, although the mayor himself is no prize.

Donald Shaw is a convicted heroin dealer, a Rikers Island alumnus, a man who never submitted fingerprints for his borough job because he knew his criminal past would come screaming out of the database like a banshee in a church.

He has somehow clung to power with the tenacity of a cockroach. He even convinced Union County politicians to give him an $80,000 job in the Department of Parks and Recreation.

If you imagine Leslie Knope turning experience slinging heroin into a post secured with political muscle, you’re still not going to understand that these are the people who run Roselle.

These are the people who tried to destroy a 31-year veteran of the police department over a private joke, and instead saddled overburdened taxpayers with a massive bill for legal fees, back pay, and damages.

Councilwoman-At-Large Cynthia Johnson has been the sole voice of reason on the governing body, but Second Ward Councilman Brandon Bernier broke with Shaw over a $259 property tax increase in April.

That tax hike was rushed through without a completed annual financial statement, which is customarily submitted before the subsequent year’s budget introduction, but if Bernier breaks ranks with Shaw, it could be a momentous change.

Mario Cornejo was elected to serve as Third Ward Councilman and Cynthia Atkins ousted incumbent First Ward Councilwoman Isabel Souza in the June Democratic primary election.

Although Cornejo and Atkins won’t be seated until January, Roselle can expect a potential shift from a governing body that supported Shaw 5-1, is now possibly going to oppose him 4-2, or force the Mayor to consistently break 3-3 ties.

Williams is owed close to $1 million in back pay, legal fees, and damages. The taxpayers will foot the bill. The same taxpayers who watched their government collapse into a hollow shell of cronyism and retaliation will now pay for the privilege of watching Shaw and Wilkerson lose in court.

The mayor and his council would not stop after they lost the fight. They would rather bleed the town dry. They would rather watch two men claim the same chief’s chair, both making more than $210,000 a year, both waiting for a judge to sort out the mess they created. Now, they have been sorted.

“In 40 years of practice,” Toscano said, “I’ve never seen a decision which will visit such devastating ramifications upon a municipal police department as this will.”

Tuesday morning, Williams will show up for work. Unless Shaw and Wilkerson find one more legal trick, one more stay, one more delay. They have done it before. They will try it again.

But the law is not on their side. The facts are not on their side. The judges who have looked at this case have all come to the same conclusion: Williams was railroaded. Williams was wronged. Williams gets his job back.

Helder Freire, a Roselle Police Department captain whom Shaw tapped to replace Williams as chief, is expected to file a lawsuit over his demotion. After the first few setbacks in court, Shaw and the Borough Council majority made Freire the chief, rather than the interim head of the police force.

Stacey L. Williams, 57, is registered to vote in Union County and affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Helder F. Freire, 44, a Flemington resident, is registered to vote in Hunterdon County and has no political party affiliation.

That is the truth of it. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. And the truth, in Roselle, has been a long time coming.