A New Jersey hospital executive was arrested for exposing himself in a series of incidents at the University of Delaware — and blamed “huge marital issues” for the lewd behavior, police said.
Gerald Picerno, 57, who served as executive vice president of RWJBarnabas Health, is accused of flashing his genitals on several occasions, most recently on Oct. 15 — when he allegedly approached two women in a parking garage with a T-shirt covering his penis and started shaking his buttocks at them, the Newark Post reported Monday.
A spokeswoman for the hospital told the paper that Picerno has since been placed on leave. His name and photo were also scrubbed from the company’s website.
Police in Newark, Delaware, said that officers used fingerprints and surveillance footage to link Picerno to four incidents of lewdness or indecent exposure.
The first incident dates to Sept. 15, when a 20-year-old University of Delaware student reported finding a sexually suggestive note outside before someone knocked on the door. The note also indicated that the person who wrote it had been watching women at the residence without their knowledge.
A 21-year-old student then reported to police the following day that she spotted a man standing naked and masturbating near her car behind the Main Street Plaza apartments near the campus.
The same man was spotted again about 30 minutes later by two 19-year-old students who told cops the suspect emerged naked from behind a Dumpster before holding his clothes in a bundle and jogging away, Newark Police Sgt. Gerald Bryda told the newspaper.
Investigators were able to connect Picerno to the incidents after tracing a fingerprint from the note left outside the female victim’s home. He later acknowledged being in Newark at the time of the incidents last month.
“I’m having huge marital issues,” Picerno told an officer by phone on Oct. 20. “It’s bad. That brought up some old s–t.”
Picerno, who has no affiliation to the University of Delaware, surrendered on Friday and was charged with three counts of lewdness, five counts of indecent exposure, two counts of third-degree trespassing and one count of harassment, the News Journal reports. He was later released on $5,500 bond.
Picerno, according to court files cited by the Newark Post, pleaded no contest to lewd and lascivious behavior charges in Florida in 1990 and was charged with third-degree sexual abuse in New York in 1979.