Surveillance Video Is Shown at Rape Trial of 2 Officers

By JOHN ELIGON


Published: April 7, 2011
They flashed across the gray screen for just a matter of seconds.
The woman briskly bounds toward a door, making a brief half-turn and gesturing to the police officer just behind her. A few steps back, another officer follows.
This was the surveillance footage that captured Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata accompanying a woman into her East Village apartment, an encounter that would lead to her accusation that Officer Moreno had raped her while she was drunk, while Officer Mata served as a lookout.
The clip was played publicly for the first time on Thursday during the second day of testimony in the trial of the two officers in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. It captures the first of four visits the officers made to the woman’s apartment early on the morning of Dec. 7, 2008, after she left a party at a Park Slope bar held to celebrate her job promotion. The other visits were also captured on video, taken from a security camera outside a bar adjacent to the woman’s apartment building.
For the prosecution, the video establishes that the officers, for whatever reason, visited the woman’s apartment several times that morning. But the defense will use the woman’s appearance on the tape to suggest that she was not as intoxicated as the prosecution claims, since she appears to be walking on her own. That argument was bolstered by Andom Mangum, a 35-year old teacher, who testified that as he was leaving the building that morning, the officers were escorting the woman in, and that she walked up the stairs under her own power.
A friend, Joanna Kreling, testified that later that day, the distraught woman confided to her that she believed she had been raped by a police officer.
“She was extremely broken down and just emotional and crying,” Ms. Kreling said.
Ms. Kreling and two other friends accompanied the woman to Beth Israel Medical Center, where she received a rape kit. They decided to report what had happened to the district attorney’s office rather than call the police, Ms. Kreling said.
The woman continued to appear “devastated” at the hospital, Ms. Kreling said.
The woman “is a very vivacious, energetic person and, um,” Ms. Kreling said, her eyes watering and her face turning red, “she was not that person.”
But under cross-examination, Ms. Kreling revealed that the woman, while at the hospital, said, “I can’t believe he left me like that.”
The defense plans to argue that it would have made no sense for the woman to make that comment about someone who had raped her.
The officers are accused of rape, falsifying records, official misconduct, burglary and other crimes.
Officer Moreno’s lawyers have argued that their client established a rapport with the woman when he escorted her upstairs. He returned to the woman’s apartment at her request, and he kissed her on the shoulder, but they did not have sex, they say.