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An indictment returned by a grand jury in Hackensack accuses Dammen McDuffie, 40, and 43-year-old Jennifer Boschen of Bound Brook (both above) of conspiring to intimidate a witness in his case by installing a GPS device on the Teaneck victim’s car while McDuffie was being held in the Bergen County Jail.
They also discussed removing GPS data from a computer and destroying handwritten notes in January 2013 that could have incriminated McDuffie, the indictment alleges.
McDuffie, who police told CLIFFVIEW PILOT has ties to the infamous James Bond Gang of burglars, is serving a 15½-year prison term in East Jersey State Prsion in Rahway that was handed down last summer for leading police on a wild chase after breaking into two Nutley homes.
Hakeem Chance (l.), Dammen McDuffie (FILE PHOTO: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
Jurors last April convicted McDuffie and Hakeem Chance on just about every count in connection with the break-ins and chase involving officers and detectives from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and Englewood, Fort Lee, Hackensack and Teaneck police departments.
Prosecutors told jurors during the 11-day trial that Chance was driving his mother’s BMW during the July 2012 pursuit through Nutley and parts of Bloomfield and Little Falls before the car slammed into a brick wall in front of a hilltop house in Montclair.
The last couple of miles were “driven on steel” after the car hit a curb, shredding the driver’s side front tire, Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor David Calviello said at the time.
According to Calviello, the area was illuminated, and Detective Johnathan Arcohas saw McDuffie “looking out the passenger side, directly at him.”
“What does McDuffie do?” he continued. “He climbed over Chance through the air bags, out the driver’s side door. He didn’t surrender. He took flight and ran as fast as he could down the hill, through a yard, through a vast, dark meadow – into brush six to eight feet high.
“Chance, having been stepped over, climbed out. He refused all commands and ‘beat feet’ the other way, through another thick, brushy meadow,” the prosecutor said. adding that he was found and arrested nearby.
Arochas later identified McDuffie through his driver’s license photo via the state motor vehicle database, Calviello said.
His chance for parole after 7½ years may well be jeopardized by the new case. As it stands now, the earliest McDuffie could be released is October 2021.
Calviello called McDuffie the “virtual poster child” of a persistent offender and “the very type of criminal the legislature had in mind when it wrote the extended term law” during his sentencing last summer.
“[He] was 18 when he committed his first felony offense, and he hasn’t stopped since,” the prosecutor told the judge.
No fewer than 20 felony convictions since then include one alongside Daniel “Tokyo” Gatson, a onetime member of the Bond gang of burglars, who drove a tricked-out BMW with special compartments for hiding stolen goods, high-intensity lights to blind pursuers and a jet that spewed oil.
In sentencing McDuffie and Chance, Superior Court Judge Patrick J. Roma said: “There’s an epidemic of burglaries in Bergen County — day, night. Something has to be done about it. The public has to be protected.”
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