Franklin Mata (Steven Hirsch)
A woman who accused two cops of raping her in her East Village apartment was so stumbling drunk that night, she couldn’t walk unassisted and vomited twice on her taxi ride home from the bar, prosecution witnesses testified yesterday.
When she couldn’t even drag herself out of the taxi outside her apartment, cabby Kofi Owusu — eager to help but barred by protocol from touching a passenger — made the fateful 911 call that summoned the two officers now charged in the rape.
“Uh, I have somebody in my cab who is so drunk that I need assistance,” Owusu says in a 911 call he made just before 1 a.m. in December 2008.
“Is it a male or female?” the female operator asks.
“Uh, it’s a female,” he answers about the queasy, 27-year- old fashion executive who had just thrown up in his back seat.
When the operator asks if the passenger is passed out, the cabby responds, “Yeah, something like that.”
Officer Kenneth Moreno, a 17-year-vet, is charged with stripping and raping the woman after she passed out on her bed. Moreno’s partner, Franklin Mata, a three-year-vet, also is charged with rape for allegedly acting as the older cop’s lookout.
To prove rape, prosecutors Coleen Balbert and Randolph Clarke must walk a fine line, showing jurors that the victim was too intoxicated to consent to sex, but sober enough to credibly remember waking up on her bed with Moreno raping her.
Yesterday’s witnesses set both sides to battling over that central issue.
The first two were the woman’s drinking partners from that night.
One called her more sick than drunk, and the other told jurors the woman needed to lean against a wall of the nightclub — South Paw in Park Slope, Brooklyn — to keep her balance.
“She just couldn’t get her bearings,” Laure Simi told jurors. “She was stumbling. Just not stable on her feet. She kept saying she wanted to go home.”
But defense lawyers — who hope to prove the woman was alert and conversational — grilled Simi concerning a Facebook exchange from the day after the alleged rape in which Simi had told the woman that she’d actually seemed “OK” that night.
“You thought she was ‘OK?’ ” defense lawyer Joseph Tacopina asked Simi, an intimate-apparel designer who worked with the victim at the Gap.
“I thought she was intoxicated, not OK,” insisted Simi. “I thought she was pretty messed up.
“Anytime I need to walk someone to the sidewalk, I’d say they were pretty intoxicated — not OK.”
Moreno is insisting things merely got a little out of hand while he was “counseling” the woman on her drinking.
Testimony continues tomorrow.