Two NYPD cops accused of raping a drunken woman as she lay face down in her bed, semiconscious and covered in vomit, made a fake 911 call so they could return to the victim's East Village apartment, according to the prosecution.
Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, who are suspended from duty, made the call from a pay phone at an intersection where they responded to a traffic accident the morning of the sexual assault, Dec. 7. The caller, who identified himself as John Edward, told police there was a drunken homeless man making a scene two doors down from where the victim lived, according to the New York Post. Prosecutors say the morning phone call is a clear sign the cops coldly plotted to rape the victim.
The officers had already been at the woman's apartment twice in less than an hour, prosecutors said, and conjured up the bogus 911 call as an excuse to go back. When they did go back, Moreno allegedly raped the incapacitated woman while his partner, Mata, acted as a lookout.
The woman reported the sexual assault the next morning and was treated at Beth Israel Hospital and released, investigators said. She reported the charges to the sex crimes unit of the district attorney's office.
The two officers were working the late shift in the 9th Precinct the night of Dec. 6 as the woman, identified as a 27-year-old professional, was out drinking with friends at a bar in Brooklyn. Her blood alcohol was at least double the legal limit and possibly more, investigators said, when her friends put her in a taxi and told the driver to take her home.
When the driver got to her address, she was so drunk she couldn't get out of the taxi, so the cabbie called 911 for help, prosecutors said. Mata, 27, and Moreno, 41, were there responded within minutes. Surveillance tape shows them helping the woman into her building and leaving a few minutes later.
But the tape also shows the officers entering and leaving the building two more times, when they had been assigned to respond to other incidents in the precinct, prosecutors said. The officers were inside the building 17 minutes the first time they returned and 34 minutes the next time, prosecutors said. They tried to shield their faces from surveillance cameras they had spotted, but a separate camera they hadn't noticed caught their faces.
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Both officers were indicted on first-degree rape charges, two counts of second-degree burglary for re-entering the apartment twice, and nine counts of official misconduct. Mata, who has been an officer for three years, also was indicted on charges of criminal facilitation and tampering with evidence for refusing to hand over his memo book used to record shift details and for not stopping the rape, prosecutors said. During the investigation, a packet of heroin was found in Moreno's police locker, and he was also charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, prosecutors said.
The officers were arraigned on Tuesday. Both pleaded not guilty.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who rarely speaks on pending cases involving officers because he may have to make internal decisions, called the allegations "disgraceful" and said he did not want the charges to tarnish the department's reputation for helping people.
"This is a shocking aberration in stark contrast to the outstanding work that the men and women of the New York City police department do every day on the streets of our city," Kelly said.
"The public needs to know that the police are there to protect them. And I believe that they do."
