Off-Duty Detective Sentenced to 18 Months for Abducting a Man at a Bar Over His Citizenship

He had a badge and no reason to use it on the man he singled out at the bar. Today a judge decided what that night costs an officer who got it this wrong.

Donald Kopchak was a Cleveland police detective assigned to a federal ATF task force. One night in April 2024, off duty and drinking at a bar in Hinckley, Ohio, he and another officer decided a man named Yonas Bokredingil did not belong in this country. They demanded his ID, took his phone and his wallet, and forced him outside, where one of them held him on the ground until on-duty police arrived. Bokredingil is a truck driver and a legal immigrant from Eritrea. He had done nothing wrong. A jury convicted Kopchak of two counts of abduction, one count of ethnic intimidation, and one count of assault, and this is the day he came back to court to learn his sentence.

This case did not arrive in that courtroom easily. After the night at the bar, the FBI took over the investigation, and it moved through the federal system for more than a year before federal prosecutors decided not to bring civil rights charges and sent it back to Medina County. The local prosecutor's office charged it as state crimes, and said something that set the tone for everything after: the badges these men carried earned them no special treatment, good or bad. The evidence got weighed on what they did, not on who they were. The other officer there that night, former Portage County deputy Daniel Lajack, took a plea to a reduced charge and was sentenced to ninety days in jail. Kopchak made the state prove its case to a jury instead, and the jury convicted him on every count he faced.

That is what makes this bigger than a bad night at a bar. Two men with badges and federal task force authority used neither one lawfully, and a man who had done nothing was the one who paid for it. The question this hearing puts in front of everyone is the one this channel keeps coming back to: what does accountability look like when the people sworn to uphold the law are the ones who broke it?

Watch what each side asks the judge to do. The prosecutor calls this a clear case of ethnic intimidation and asks for prison. The defense calls Kopchak a good father, a good coach, and a good officer, and asks for no prison at all. Watch the defense quietly put its appeal issues on the record before the sentence even comes down. And watch the moment Kopchak speaks for himself, because what he chooses to talk about, and what he leaves out, tells you where his head is.

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WATCH WITH JUSTICE

00:00 - The judge sets the table. A jury already convicted him on all four counts, and today is only about the price.
01:23 - The prosecutor points to a victim who still does not want anything bad to happen to the two officers, then says the man at the table still will not take responsibility.
03:00 - The defense quietly marks the road to appeal, a missing jury instruction and an expert report that never got in, then asks the judge for no prison at all.
04:28 - He speaks for himself, and listen to what is missing. He talks about his own honesty and never once mentions the man he was convicted of abducting.
05:18 - The judge draws the line. Her focus is not whether he is a good person, it is what he did and what it cost the victim, and then she hands down the sentence.
08:12 - A fight breaks out over whether two of the counts should collapse into one, and the judge flags it as one more issue headed for appeal.
10:14 - The defense asks to keep him free while he appeals. The judge says no, and points out he already asked to be sent to prison rather than sit in the county jail.

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