Blogfinger

By Charles Layton

At the end of every Neptune Township Committee meeting, members of the public are invited to come to the podium and ask questions or make comments on any subject they choose.

People complain about taxes, or accuse the Township of poor management, or ask for help with standing water or some other problem in their neighborhood. The Committee members have pretty much heard it all, many times over.

But on Monday night a man named George Matreyek of Seaside Park, NJ, took everyone by surprise. He told the Committee he had once been, at various times, a mayor, a committeeman and a member of the zoning and planning boards in Andover Township. “So I’ve been in your position,” he said, “and I’m hoping you can help me.”

After his retirement, Matreyek told the Committee, he and his wife moved to northeastern Pennsylvania where he took a part-time job at an outdoor store selling firearms and ammunition. Anyone who takes such a job must submit to a routine background check, and when Matreyek’s report came back “it said I was a convicted felon.” It also said he had served a year in prison for his alleged crime — assaulting a Neptune Township police officer.

So in December, Matreyek lost his job.

He says he’s absolutely certain he was never convicted of any felony, let alone served time in any prison. “He’s been in my bed for all that time,” his wife, Barbara, told me out in the hallway after the meeting.

Matreyek told me he and his wife have established that the crime in question was committed on June 26, 1998, that the perpetrator was a woman, not a man, and that she was convicted in Manasquan Superior Court. However, he said, through some typo or other form of bureaucratic foulup, Matreyek’s Social Security number was attached to the woman’s name. This misinformation has spread across federal, state and local databases far and wide, and officials have refused to take responsibility for correcting the mixup, he said. In the eyes of the government, at all levels, he remains a criminal and an ex-con.

Barbara Matreyek said one of the first phone calls she made, trying to clear things up, was to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The woman on the other end of the line, she said, told her, “Well, you don’t really know your husband that well. Men can tell you anything.”

Neither the ATF, the FBI nor the U.S. Justice Department has been willing to take their problem seriously, they told me.

The bum rap has been humiliating. It has damaged his reputation. People “think of him now as a convicted criminal,” his wife said.

“Nobody will clear it up but its obviously wrong,” he said. “I don’t know the name of the woman. Don’t know her age. Nothing.” Officials have denied them that information, he said, for privacy reasons.

In his speech before the Township Committee, Matreyek said that because the object of the assault 14 years ago had been a Neptune policeman, he hoped Neptune could get to the bottom of things “and get it corrected on down the line, and on up the line.”

The Committee said they would try.

Matreyek told me, though, that no matter what happens now he doubts he can get his job back. “They had to hire someone else,” he said.