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| NEWS > 15 August 2007 |
Other related articles:
NY suburban cops face manslaug
Manslaughter, rape, assault. A recent spate of allegations against police officers on the outskirts of New York City has raised fears that a big-city problem has invaded the suburbs.
The cluster of incidents over the past year in Westchester County may be an aberration, but even a partial list seems shocking in this relatively affluent and quiet New York City suburb:
A Mount Kisco officer was charged with manslaughter in the death of a homeless, drunken immigrant who had suffered a blow to his abdomen. Officer George Bubaris has since resigned and is fighting the charge, bu... Read more
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New York Times - United States
15 August 2007
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USA: Police Captain on Trial i
In September 2006 a police captain in a jealous rage dragged an officer under his command by her hair into a car on a Greenwich Village street and beat her savagely, a prosecutor told a Manhattan jury yesterday.
As the assault trial got under way, the prosecutor said that the captain, Alberto Sanchez, had had a two-year affair with the officer, Sharon Gandarilla, whom she described as the reluctant and terrified participant in a covert and abusive affair.
The prosecutor, Jessica Taub, told the jury in Manhattan’s Criminal Court that the officer “was hoping that no one would find out that she, a married woman and police officer, was having an affair with her supervisor, the captain of her precinct.”
In addition to that, the prosecutor said, “She was also hoping no one would find out who gave her the bruises that she showed up at work with.”
One witness yesterday, Anton Wilkinson, a New York University security guard, said that he saw the beating and tried to help. But Captain Sanchez muttered, “I’m on the job,” Mr. Wilkinson said, so he “backed off.”
But Captain Sanchez’s lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, attacked Officer Gandarilla’s credibility, saying that the relationship was consensual and that if Officer Gandarilla had been beaten, it was not by Captain Sanchez.
In the most dramatic testimony at yesterday’s trial, Mr. Wilkinson identified Captain Sanchez as the man who had beaten Officer Gandarilla.
“You can’t say that this male is this defendant, can you?” Mr. Kornberg demanded, with some flourish, during his cross-examination of Mr. Wilkinson.
“Yes sir, I can,” Mr. Wilkinson shot back, as Captain Sanchez, a stocky man with a crew cut, looked back at him from the defense table with a tight smile.
Mr. Wilkinson testified that he was sitting in his N.Y.U. van writing in his official memo book when he noticed a couple arguing in a black Honda parked across the street from him at Lafayette and East Fourth Streets on Sept. 1, 2006.
He said he saw the man race around to the passenger side of the car and begin beating the woman with his fists and kicking her lower body as she sat in the car.
Mr. Wilkinson said he got out of the van, walked over to the car and asked the woman, “Do you need my help?” “She said no, she just needed her keys,” he said.
Mr. Wilkinson conceded that he had not identified Captain Sanchez when he was shown a photographic array by the police during the investigation. But he said that all the photographs were of men dressed very similarly in white shirts and ties, and that he had told the police that one of the photographs looked familiar.
Mr. Kornberg said Officer Gandarilla had fabricated her accusations to bolster a lawsuit she filed this month in Federal District Court in Manhattan, charging the city and Captain Sanchez with subjecting her to discrimination and sexual harassment on the job.
“You are going to find that this complainant is a woman who makes accusations but can’t back up the accusations because they don’t comport with common sense,” Mr. Kornberg said.
In his opening, Mr. Kornberg suggested that as a police officer who “carried a gun, carried a shield, carried a baton and was trained in self-defense,” Officer Gandarilla was an unlikely victim of what he called “rape.”
He said he would introduce recorded conversations and cellphone records to show that Officer Gandarilla called Captain Sanchez 379 times after the assault. He did not describe the contents of those conversations.
Officer Gandarilla, 33, a nine-year veteran of the police force, says in her federal suit that Captain Sanchez, 42, began making romantic and sexual advances toward her in February 2004, after she returned from maternity leave, and that she soon “relented” and began an affair with him.
The pair met in 2003 when Officer Gandarilla was assigned to the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem as a crime analyst, and Captain Sanchez became the precinct’s executive officer. Her lawsuit says that the affair grew increasingly coercive as Captain Sanchez physically and sexually assaulted her 30 times between March 2005 and December 2006.
Captain Sanchez is now on modified duty, assigned to a desk job without a weapon, his lawyer said.
Officer Gandarilla also charges in her federal complaint that when she was attacked on the street in September 2006, it was witnessed by Internal Affairs officers who were investigating Captain Sanchez on unrelated misconduct charges, and that the officers did nothing to help her.
“That’s not true,” said Paul J. Browne, a spokesman for the Police Department. He said that Internal Affairs surveillance was not being carried out at the time Officer Gandarilla was assaulted. Mr. Browne said that Captain Sanchez had been accused of favoritism toward Officer Gandarilla, but that those charges had not been substantiated.
Prosecutors said Officer Gandarilla was expected to testify today.
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