anybody know anything about this?

bridgecleaners

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/10/23/2008-10-23_brooklyn_man_accuses_5_cops_of_sodomy_at.html

i'm a bit slow, so i just heard about it last night when i got off the train at my stop, where this happened.

any news? witnesses? anything?

i'm shocked...but shouldn't be.

sweet tea

whoa. that's...weird. especially at 12:30 in the afternoon, in a well-traveled, very open station. given the description of the scene via witnesses -- granted, as relayed through a police source -- is it awful if i'm not 100% convinced this happened exactly as described?

if it did happen, then it's beyond imagining why the cops in question are still walking around.

homeowner

Acording to initial reports, the cops have said there were many witnesses. Reporters did say that witnesses indicated that the guy was screaming about the police tasering him and sticking a walkie talkie up his butt, but no one has come forward to say they actually saw these acts occur.

The whole thing is just crazy.

jack krohn

In Case of Man Alleging Brutality, Many Conflicting Claims

By ANNE BARNARD and AL BAKER
Published: October 24, 2008

The case of a Brooklyn man who says he was sodomized by police officers at a subway station last week presents two sets of assertions, and they are hard to reconcile.

A man says that officers sodomized him at the Prospect Park subway station; the police say that no sodomy occurred.

According to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation, witnesses who saw officers confront the man, Michael Mineo, on Oct. 15 at the Prospect Park station on suspicion of smoking marijuana said that they saw no sodomy occur.

But lawyers for Mr. Mineo, 24, a tattoo parlor employee, say that he was left with a tear in his rectum that left him hospitalized until Oct. 19, and that hospital records, which they declined to provide to reporters, attributed his condition to “anal assault.”

Another law enforcement official said Mr. Mineo’s injuries raised enough concerns with a medical staff member at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center that she notified the police Internal Affairs Bureau the day after the episode. A person briefed on the inquiry has said that investigators have found no evidence that the injury was sustained in an altercation with the police.

Internal Affairs is investigating the matter but has not questioned the officers involved, nor has the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which is also investigating the case, according to a law enforcement official.

The officers remained on regular duty Friday. Those decisions would be highly unusual if the police believed that the attack occurred, and could draw criticism if the accusations are proved credible.

Mr. Mineo’s lawyers, Kevin L. Mosley and Stephen C. Jackson, said at a news conference on Friday that they were deeply concerned that the officers were not at least placed on modified duty and stripped of their guns, and that they were a threat to their client.

The lawyers also said they had interviewed four witnesses who corroborate Mr. Mineo’s version of events, and that police have not yet requested a copy of the hospital report.

“For the police to come to a conclusion that there is no support of evidence of the attack, that’s ludicrous,” Mr. Mosley told reporters at his Midtown law office.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office, still trying to reconstruct the full sequence of events, set up a hot line on Friday asking anyone who witnessed “an incident involving several police officers” at the Prospect Park subway station between 1 and 2 p.m. on Oct. 15 to call (718) 250-2759.

Mr. Mineo checked into another hospital on Friday with what his lawyers described as intense pain and blood in his urine, and could not be reached for comment.

He had been scheduled to appear Saturday with his lawyers at the Harlem headquarters of the Rev. Al Sharpton to rally community support on Mr. Sharpton’s morning radio broadcast.

But after Mr. Mineo entered the hospital Friday, Mr. Sharpton said he would visit him there after his broadcast.

The sodomy allegation drew a comparison of sorts to the attack on Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was tortured with a broken broomstick in 1997. One police officer was sentenced to 30 years in prison in that attack, and a second served five years for perjury.

But there are several significant differences between the cases. Mr. Louima was black and his police attackers were white. Mr. Mineo’s lawyers described him as white and Hispanic. The police officers involved in the case are white, black and Hispanic, according to Mr. Mineo’s lawyers.

Mr. Louima was assaulted in a bathroom in a police station house; Mr. Mineo’s lawyers say he was sodomized in public near a subway information booth .

And in a case of conflicting accounts where credibility matters, Mr. Louima had no criminal record; Mr. Mineo has been arrested several times. According to Pennsylvania records, he was charged in 2003 with running up more than $6,000 charges on stolen credit cards.

He was arrested most recently on April 18, when he was charged with hitting someone with a wooden stool in the Downtown Brooklyn tattoo parlor where he works.

Police did not release the names of the five officers involved, all men, but said they had no history of disciplinary problems. The most senior has served for six years; the most junior for two and a half.

The officer said to be the one accused of using an object to sodomize Mr. Mineo was working in the field on Friday afternoon, according to a sergeant at the 71st Precinct.

Another officer, who did not wish to be identified, called the allegations “very strange.”

“He’s a very good guy,” the officer said of his colleague as he got behind the wheel of a patrol car. “It’s all unfounded,” another officer said.

Both sides offered conflicting details Friday about the series of events at the subway station.

In the early afternoon of Oct. 15, two uniformed police officers saw Mr. Mineo smoking marijuana, a law enforcement official said. When they approached, the official said, “He bolts.”

The officers chased Mr. Mineo down the stairs into the subway station. Two more uniformed officers arrived as he was about to escape, and at some point a Transit Bureau officer arrived.

Two witnesses, a 12-year-old and an adult, watched as officers tried to handcuff Mr. Mineo, who was on the floor, the official said. They heard him yell “Stop Tasering me!” — a reference to a Taser stun gun, which none of the officers had — and that they were “sticking a walkie-talkie” into his rectum. The official said the witnesses saw nothing in the officers’ hands.

The official said the station had surveillance cameras but none of the tapes captured the struggle.

Mr. Mineo was taken to a police car, given a summons for disorderly conduct and released. Officers did not find any marijuana; according to the law enforcement official, he told the officers he had swallowed it. Mr. Mineo’s lawyers gave a different version.

According to Mr. Mosley, Mr. Mineo was on his way to work when the police “jumped out and basically terrorized him.” Mr. Mosley added that Mr. Mineo told the lawyers that he had been “punched and kicked and knocked down” by the police.

“Michael was handcuffed lying down on the ground,” Mr. Mosley said. An officer took out a radio, he said. “He felt an object being forced into his rectum with great force, repeatedly”

Mr. Mosley added, “He said that he saw white.”

Mr. Mosley said Mr. Mineo, in great panic and distress, “sort of blacked out,” at least at one point.

He said his client was warned by the police that he should not go to anyone to complain about what had happened, or “’we’ll charge you with a felony.’”

Mr. Mineo called a friend, who took him to Brookdale.

Mr. Mineo left the hospital on Oct. 19; his lawyer read reporters what he said was a hospital discharge summary. Part of it said, “Patient is a 24-year-old male — comes in the E.R. — he complains that he was assaulted by the police, by a foreign object, rectally.”

Then Mr. Mosley skipped to a portion of the report that he said was labeled “principal diagnosis” and read aloud: “anal assault.”

It was not clear whether that diagnosis was based on what Mr. Mineo told doctors or whether the doctors independently reached that conclusion.

A hospital spokesman declined to discuss the case, citing patient privacy.

Mr. Mosley and Mr. Jackson said four witnesses backed Mr. Mineo’s account, but they would not identify them.

Mr. Mosley said that one of the four “is a person who was stopped with Mr. Mineo” by officers at the subway station on Oct. 15. He added that this witness is a “friend of Mr. Mineo.”

A friend of Mr. Mineo’s, Jason Amolsch, said on Thursday that he saw a bloodied Mr. Mineo at the station after the encounter, but did not say he witnessed it. Mr. Amolsch did not say that he was stopped by the police.