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12.10.2008 8:56am EST
(New York City) A police officer warned a tattoo parlor worker that if he reported being sodomized with a baton during an arrest at a subway station, officers would lock him up for a felony, prosecutors say.
The threat was among details to emerge as the Brooklyn district attorney announced an indictment charging Officer Richard Kern and two other patrolmen with felonies.Kern, 25, was charged with aggravated sexual abuse and assault after the Oct. 15 confrontation. Fellow Officers Alex Cruz and Andrew Morales were charged with hindering prosecution and official misconduct for allegedly covering up the crime.
All three pleaded not guilty Tuesday in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn. As Cruz and Morales were released without bail and left the courtroom, accuser Michael Mineo glared at them and clapped sarcastically. Kern left minutes later after posting $15,000 bail.
“I relive this every day. I’m still in pain,” Mineo, a 24-year-old body piercer, said outside the courtroom. “No one should go through this.”
The Associated Press does not usually name people alleging sexual abuse, but Mineo has come forward publicly to detail his ordeal, speaking to the news media and allowing himself to be photographed and captured on video.
Kern’s attorney, John Patten, told reporters that civilian witnesses standing only a few feet away from the officers and Mineo never saw a sex assault. He predicted his client would prevail at trial.
“I represent a very decent young man,” he said.
Lawyers for Cruz and Morales denied their clients were part of a cover-up.
“They don’t even have a paper-thin case. They have no case,” said Cruz’s attorney, Stuart London.
At a news conference earlier Tuesday, prosecutors for the first time confirmed reports of perhaps the strongest piece of evidence against Kern: DNA recovered from the baton matched that of the victim, they said. They also said two officers had given grand jury testimony that supported Mineo’s allegations.
But District Attorney Charles Hynes was at a loss to explain why a skinny police officer who could pass for a teenager would commit a sex crime while on duty in the middle of the day in a busy subway station.
“I can’t deal with a motive,” Hynes said. “I just don’t know.”
In the most detailed narrative to date of the incident, prosecutors said Kern and Morales spotted Mineo outside the subway station smoking marijuana. When they sought to stop him, he fled into the station, jumped a turnstile, ran toward the platform and hurdled another turnstile before he was pinned down, handcuffed near a token booth and searched for drugs, they said.
With Mineo in a “helpless position” with his pants down, Kern took out a retractable baton and shoved it into the victim’s buttocks, said Assistant District Attorney Charles Guria. The baton pierced Mineo’s underwear, tore his rectum and drew blood, the prosecutor said.
To cover his tracks and with the other officers’ knowledge, Kern wrote Mineo “a bogus summons” that was purposely backdated so it would be invalid, then warned him to keep quiet or face a felony, prosecutors said.
Police initially questioned Mineo’s account and allowed the officers to stay on duty. But the case gained momentum in late October after Mineo’s lawyers went public with his allegations and the district attorney launched a grand jury investigation.
If convicted, Kern could face up to 25 years in prison; the others could face up to four years.
This is not gay sex of any kind. It is rape of a male by a male with a baton doing penis duty. Rape is a crime of dominataion not a crime of sex. The sex is only incidental to the rapist’s real source of enjoyment which is the power over the one violated. Gay sex is two men having consensual relations where both are seeking pleasure. The declared sexual orientation of either is immaterial to whether or not gay sex happens. The consensual aspect of it is not.
Not seeing its relevance.
Dave W is right. The story should be out there regardless of the sexual orientation of either the accused or the victim. For some reason, male-on-male rape is starting to happen more frequently, or maybe being reported more frequently, and so it should be out there.
If there’s the victim’s DNA on the end of the baton how did it get there? It must have entered some orifice, right?
first a mea culpa on my part. Like DA Hynes I thought this just didn’t make sense and there had to be more to this story. Given the time & location I found it hard to believe. Unlike the Louima case, this wasn’t steroid crazed white cops in the privacy of a stationhouse bathroom assaulting a black man, but a subway station right by the turnstiles and token booth – witnesses up the yingyang! To my knowledge former PO Volpe has never explained why with all the various tried & true techniques used to give a “Tuneup” to a prisoner he got creative and went anal. Maybe the steroids?Then again, given the abysmal level to which investigative reporting has fallen to and the total corruption & censorship of all forms of news media in this country, I doubt one can figure this one out even after the trial, if there is one.
Some thoughts though:
Dave you right it should be out there just so people know these things do happen and some of “Kelly’s Heros” do have clay feet!
What are the sexual orientation of all the involved parties? Maybe PO Kern is a closet case?
The DNA says the baton was where it shouldn’t have been, but the victims underwear was – not the usual bare ass assault. Could this have been accidental during the struggle to subdue the suspect as there is not reports of verbal threats to stick it to him? Then the coverup -lets make a deal, fudge the summons so it get thrown out instead of getting locked up, keep you mouth shut about this and everyone forgets it ever happened, a win-win! No dozens of report on injured prisoners, no sitting for hours or days in the ER guarding the prisoner, where’s the pot or the joint, IAD Spooks,SGT & CAPT pissed off. Sometimes a web of lies seems easier than the truth! Wrong! We shall see!
I’m surprised no comments complaining about this story as irrelevant to the gay community, as we usually see with so called straight male sexual assault.
I’ll pre-empt: I think it does matter. Straight guys act out on their testosterone crazed anger by raping other men with inanimate objects and we sit back and say has nothing to do with gay.
It sure does. Humanity needs to understand that there exists a spectrum of sexuality and one really abhorrent area of that spectrum is male sexual superiority. If we get people to realize that seemingly straight guys will sodomize to humiliate, we might start to unravel the tightly wound web of male straightness to reveal a cleverly hidden world of sexual meandering that indicates we aren’t so abnormal.
No, I’m not comfortable with the thought that we might use male on male sexual violence to make a point about us, but it does make the point. Straight men are not as normal as society makes them out to be. they are obsessed with their penises, others penises and others asses. Just watch a basketball team in action. They wrap all this up in a ball of homophobia and don’t like to talk about it, but getting it out in the open will open minds about the weird world of human sexuality.
If we let this cop get away with mere assault, not GAY sexual assault, we miss a big opportunity to point out the hypocrisy in the male straigt-at-all-costs attitude.