A Delco judge is weighing the fate of a firefighter accused of making racist threats
John Romano used the N-word, as well as another racial epithet, while arguing with a woman in November 2024, according to prosecutors in Delaware County.
The fate of an assistant Delaware County fire chief accused of hurling racist threats at a woman during a tense confrontation in 2024 is now in the hands of a judge.
John Romano, 48, was charged with ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats, and related crimes after a woman, who is Black, told police he called her the N-word, along with another racial epithet, while she was stopped in traffic because Romano’s forklift was blocking traffic on Hook Road in Darby Township in November 2024.
Romano, of Secane, served as the assistant fire chief at the Sharon Hill Fire Company, an all-volunteer station, but was suspended by borough officials after his arrest, pending the outcome of his trial.
During Romano’s one-day bench trial Wednesday before Judge Margaret J. Amoroso, the woman testified that a line of cars, whose drivers started honking out of frustration, had lined up behind hers. The road was blocked, she said, because Romano was using the forklift to load Christmas trees at J&P Fencing, a business he co-founded.
After the car in front of hers squeezed through a small gap near the forklift, the woman said, Romano got out of the forklift, “rushed” to the passenger-side window of her car and demanded to know why she was honking at him.
From the outset, she said, Romano was “on full-blast rage.”
He called her the N-word, as well as another slur, she said, and took a picture of her license plate, telling her he would “take care” of her at her home. When she said she was calling the police, Romano told her to do so, saying he knew the county sheriff.
“I really couldn’t believe this was happening in the year that we were in,” she said.
Body-camera footage played in court showed Romano initially admitted to the responding Darby Township officers that he called the woman the N-word, but, minutes later, walked back the statement.
He also told the officers that the woman is “a wild animal, and I’m tired of dealing with them,” the footage showed.
That comment, said Assistant District Attorney Shuaiyb Newton, demonstrated Romano’s mindset and proved his guilt.
“It’s clear beyond all doubt that a threat was made from a man to a woman that he would find her and take care of her, a man who was upset, a man who was screaming, and a man who hates her,” Newton said. “And it’s clear the hatred he had for this stranger was based on nothing more than what she looked like.”
Romano’s attorney, Chris Boggs, disputed that. He said the confrontation was “more akin to a road-rage incident,” and was not a case of ethnic intimidation.
Romano, upset at the car horns honking, would have said “awful things to anyone in that circumstance,” he said. Because the driver was Black, Boggs said, he used the racial epithet.
But Boggs said Romano did not threaten violence.
“If this was something more than transitionary anger, something that happens in the moment ... he’s going to be using specific threats of violence,” the lawyer said.
Amoroso is expected to deliver her verdict in the case on Aug. 31.
