For a kiss, he lost everything – his career, his livelihood, his reputation.
A Midtown police officer pleaded guilty in Manhattan yesterday to a grotesque romance with an infatuated 13-year-old girl.
Robert Friedrich – a six-year NYPD veteran – will now serve six years’ probation, remain on a state sex-offender registry for a decade, and resign immediately from the force under the terms of his guilty plea to felony sex abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.
“This defendant was grooming this 13-year-old girl to be his teenaged mistress,” Assistant District Attorney James Roberts told a jury in opening statements earlier yesterday, before Friedrich got cold feet about trying his luck at trial and admitted the sordid affair.
The toweringly tall, married father of two had been caught back in February, French-kissing his swooning victim on a busy sidewalk outside her West 42nd Street apartment building.
It was about two weeks into the twisted relationship. Friedrich was on break and in full uniform as he bent his 6-foot, 7-inch frame to -in the words of the criminal complaint against him – “insert his tongue in informant’s mouth.”
“He was wearing his uniform,” Vanessa Blanco, a family friend of the victim, told jurors before the plea cut short the trial.
“He was a lot taller than her. They was French-kissing. They was making out.”
Earlier that day, he’d typed some text messages with his young prey – who’d been braced to testify against him yesterday morning about three kissy sessions.
“Technically you are a minor and i [sic] could get in trouble for being the way i am with you but i can’t help the way i feel for you,” he gushed in one.
In other text messages shown to jurors just before the lunch break, the creepy cop told the girl he loved her, promising that if they could just be alone together, “i could make all your dreams come true.” He signed his messages, “Stretch.”
“I want your body pressed against me and your lips against mine,” he texted her. The messages – about 30 in all – were sent from a phone paid for by an account in Friedrich’s wife’s name, prosecutors told jurors.
“You’d think that someone in his position would know better,” one juror, Charles Thompson, said as he left court.