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‘It was a hectic night,’ claims
Officer Paola Diaz in her testimony about the alleged attack on transit Sgt.
Adonis Ramirez. The five, against whom charges were later dropped, are now
suing the NYPD for $10 million.
BY MICHAEL FEENEY AND CORKY
SIEMASZKO
This could be called the case
of the missing snowball.
An NYPD officer admitted
Wednesday that she didn’t note in an arrest report on five young Bronx men that
the cop they allegedly attacked — transit Sgt. Adonis Ramirez — claimed he was
hit with a snowball.
No,” Officer Paola Diaz
answered when asked if the word “snowball” appeared anywhere in the report
charging the five with criminal possession of a weapon
Diaz also could not explain why
she wrote that one of the suspects, Anthony Aquino, was also charged with
disorderly conduct and harassment.
“I made a mistake,” Diaz
testified. “It was a hectic night. It was me by myself doing everything. I made
a mistake in my paperwork.”
Attorney Neil Wollerstein, who
is representing the “Snowball Five” in their $10 million false-arrest lawsuit
against the NYPD, called Diaz’ shaky testimony more proof that Ramirez’s story
is all we
“He made up facts,” the lawyer
said. “He never got hit with a snowball...His story is just all over the
place.”
Ramirez claims he pulled his
loaded gun on the gang in February 2010 after they bombarded him with
snowballs. The charges against the five were later dropped.
“I was outnumbered and I wasn’t taking any
chances,” Ramirez testified Wednesday on the stand.
But a day earlier, Ramirez
conceded the supposed assault was not as fearsome as he first described and
that he was hit with just “one” snowball.
Now even that snowball appears
to have melted away.
