Both cops were with her in her bedroom.
The alleged victim in the “rape cops” trial stuck to her story today on the last of her three days of testimony, telling jurors that both officers were present as she lay drunk and semi-consciousness on her bed.
“I remember that there were two voices in my bedroom,” she told jurors.
“I woke up to being penetrated once, but there were two cops with me after,” she insisted, describing the moment after being allegedly raped in her East Village bedroom on a Vodka-soaked morning in 2008.
The pretty and petite 29-year-old fashion executive would conclude her testimony just before lunch, giving jurors a cordial, “Thank you for listening,” as she stepped down. She had testified all day Thursday and Friday, and returned today for a final morning-long round of questioning.
She told jurors she was only conscious of an attack by a single officer. But afterward, she said, both cops searched the bed around her. She could feel their hands patting the mattress, and see a flashlight beam flicking near her, in the moments before the two men exited her apartment in an audible flurry of conversation and police radio crackle, she testified.
The testimony is important because accused attacker Officer Kenneth Moreno, 43, and his accused lookout, Officer Franklin Mata, 27, are both charged with rape under the theory that the younger cop — in serving as his partner’s accomplice — is equally guilty.
The cops had been summoned to the woman’s address at 1 in the morning on a December Sunday, by a cabbie who needed help getting the vomiting woman out of his cab. They were caught on sidewalk surveillance video using her key to re-enter her building three more times over the next four hours.
Mata’s lawyer, Edward Mandery, spent much of his morning cross-examination of the woman striving to portray his client as being as physically distant as possible to her bedroom.
Didn’t she tell one of her friends later that very day that just one of the cops was in her bedroom, the lawyer asked.
“I definitely remember hearing two men’s voices, and the police walkie-talkies,” she maintained.
The woman had testified all day Thursday and Friday, giving a detail-rich account of the few moments she can recall from that pre-dawn morning. Among the more persuasively vivid of her memories were the sound of Velcro being ripped apart just before the alleged rape and, afterward, seeing “multiple” hands and the flashlight beam examining the bed around her.
Prosecutors are expected to argue in closings that the Velcro-rip sound was Moreno taking off his bullet proof vest, and that Moreno — and possibly Mata as well — had scoured her bed to be sure they left no evidence behind.
There are no forensics implicating the cops in an actual rape; in proving their case, prosecutors are relying primarily on the sidewalk surveillance video, evidence of the woman’s hysteria concerning the incident in the hours afterward, her compelling trial testimony, and police records indicating that the two officers covered their tracks with dispatchers and superiors that night.
But prosecutors have promised medical evidence proving the woman exhibited minor redness or inflamation on an area of her cervix consistent with her testimony of being raped as she lay prone on her stomach. Today, Dr. Burnell Brunious, an emergency physician from Beth-Israel Medical Center, showed jurors a photo of that redness taken as he examined her.
Under cross-examination by Moreno’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, the doctor conceded that the redness can have causes beyond trauma, including a viral infection or bacterial imbalance. Testimony continues tomorrow.
