An ex-NYPD cop and a trembly-voiced young runaway are facing each other in an emotional Manhattan statutory rape trial today.
“It was weird,” the girl told jurors of Darrin Nemelc, 44, luring her up to his Washington Heights apartment on a promise of helping her — only to find herself having sex for the first time in her troubled life.
“I never asked for it, but at the same time, I was kind of curious,” the girl told jurors, her voice quavering and childlike.
Nemelc had found the girl crying on a bench outside his apartment on Riverside Drive early last New Year’s Day, prosecutors say, but instead of helping her, wound up helping himself.
First Nemelc gave her a blanket and let her stretch out on his sofa — but he kept insisting she take a bath, the girl testified.
“I kept saying I was fine. Then he said ‘well, you know, you stink.’ For some reason that got to me,” she said of her decision to step into Nemelc’s bathtub. “I don’t know, maybe I’m sensitive. So I said Ok.”
Nemelc knew her age — 14 —- because once she started having second thoughts, she told him, she testified.
“I did say ‘You know this is illegal,’ ” said the girl, whose name and identifying features are being withheld due to the nature of the allegations.
“And he said he knew,” she told jurors. “I did tell him that.”
Nemelc’s DNA turned up in saliva swabbed from the girl’s breast — but Nemelc is insisting he had no sexual contact with the girl and has no clue how it got there.
Complicating the case forensics is the fact that DNA from two additional, unidentified sources was also found on her breasts.
Defense lawyers are expected to cross examine the girl this afternoon on her history of psychosis and an instance in which she made an unsubstantiated accusation of sexual assault against a mental health worker.
Nemelc, a cop for seven years before leaving the NYPD in 1999 and taking a transit job, is fighting charges of rape, criminal sex act and sex abuse.