Right, just verification is all that's needed. "Killingly police records confirm Rivers was arrested on January 77th" or whatever. Or maybe "Killingly police confirm Rivers was detained briefly, but note that he was never arrested". Anything like that would be great. Even "Reached for comment, Killingly police were unable to confirm Rivers' arrest, but would not deny the arrest occurred" would at least be something.

But failing to even get that far tells me that either the author doesn't care about whether this is true (not unlikely given her day job), or that they're deliberately hiding something (maybe "Killingly police deny the arrest and have no record of the interaction with Rivers").