A recently fired Kissimmee deputy police chief failed to perform his duties and take proper action in the investigation of an officer who brutally beat a man and mired the agency in scandal, an internal affairs report shows.
Wilson Muñoz, who had been with the Kissimmee Police Department since 1999 and served as deputy chief since 2023, was fired last month following an internal investigation into his role in what a grand jury called a cover-up of former officer Andrew Baseggio’s beating of a man within his own home, department officials confirmed last week.
A newly released internal affairs report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel said Muñoz violated the department’s standards of professional conduct by accepting Baseggio’s internal charge as a mere “policy violation” when there was a clear “excessive force” issue. He also approved a “clearly insufficient” discipline for Baseggio, the report says.
The case began in April 2023, when Baseggio responded to a disturbance at a house on Brack Street. Body-worn camera video showed him entering without a warrant and attacking Sean Kastner by kneeing him in the face and stunning him multiple times with a Taser. Kastner was not resisting arrest, authorities said.
Muñoz, who said he had been recently promoted to deputy chief at the time, met with then-Chief Betty Holland and then-Deputy Chief Camille Alicea to discuss if Baseggio’s use of force was criminal. The three unanimously agreed that the case was not criminal and lacked intent, the report said.
The department’s internal investigation into Baseggio found that the violation he committed was a violation of rules and not the specific excessive force violation that existed in the agency’s standards of conduct. Muñoz’s subordinates subsequently recommended Baseggio receive an 8-hour suspension as discipline, according to the report.
Muñoz accepted the investigation’s findings that Baseggio hadn’t committed an excessive force violation and approved the 8-hour suspension. However, when internal investigators spoke to Muñoz in July as part of his own internal investigation, he testified he believed Baseggio’s actions were excessive force.
When internal investigators asked how he thought the 8-hour suspension was appropriate given the circumstances of the case, he said, “In my mind it made sense.”
However, Muñoz acknowledged to internal investigators that with his additional time and experience now as a deputy chief, he would not have made the same decision. He agreed that based on the totality of the events during Baseggio’s beating of Kastner, the decision to give an eight-hour suspension was inappropriate.
The report notes when he was previously asked by the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office why he accepted the findings of Baseggio’s internal investigation, he said “That’s just the way things were done.”
He also told the State Attorney’s Office that he was not aware at the time that agency policy allowed him to amend the charge on an internal affairs case and believed only Holland, as chief, could do so. However, he said he didn’t inform Holland of any concerns with the internal investigation’s findings.
Baseggio was ultimately sentenced to nine months in jail after pleading guilty to felony battery, witness tampering and official misconduct. The “culture of cover-up” described by a grand jury eventually resulted in several officers being fired or forced to resign, including Holland.
