A troubled nine-year-old boy burst into angry tears on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom today, rising from his chair and stamping his feet in fury as he testified against his alleged school-aide sex molester.
“I don’t believe that you’re trying to do the right thing!” the boy shouted at his alleged attacker’s lawyer during cross examination.
“You’re trying to make me cry!” the child yelled after the lawyer suggested that the aide, Gregory Atkins, 56, had actually been “nice” to him. Atkins is charged with first degree sexual abuse for allegedly repeatedly molesting the boy last February inside the boys room and the auditorium of the well-regarded PS 87 on the Upper West Side.
“He treated you nicely, didn’t he?” the lawyer, David Segal, said of Atkins.
“Shut up!” the kid snapped in response, his voice loud and his eyes filling with tears. “And stop being a bully!”
Pressed to answer the question, the kid yelled, “He did until that something happened. On one day something very, very, very bad happened.
“He told me to strip down naked!”
When the lawyer said at another point, “Mr. Atkins said he never did anything to you,” the kid snapped back angrily.
“Yeah and you believe him!” he shouted.
“Are you trying to get me angry because if you are, I suggest you stop,” the kid added, standing up and giving the chair behind him a kick.
He started crying again, his face red and his lip trembling.
When the defense lawyer suggested to the boy that he try to remain calm, the boy snapped again.
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
In his testimony — which is slated to continue throughout the afternoon — the child is insisting the aide repeatedly molested him last February inside the boys room and the auditorium of a prominent Upper West Side elementary school.
First, though, prosecutors gave the accused pedophile one last chance to stop the trial.
“My client insists he is innocent,” Segal told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro, turning down the DA’s renewed offer that if Atkins pleaded guilty, his prison sentence would be capped at five years.
Atkins is accused of a course of action over a series of weeks at PS 87 that began with massaging the second grader’s feet, continued with telling the boy to disrobe so he could “check for bruises,” and culminated with a rejected request for a sex act in the auditorium.
Atkins was the second grader’s assigned paraprofessional, entrusted with keeping a special watch during class time and removing the child to a hallway or auditorium for counseling or other assistance during outbursts. The boy had occasional bouts of frustration and tantrums, his teachers have testified.
“Gregory Atkins was my para,” the child told the jury shortly after taking the stand this morning. He smiled nervously when asked by a prosecutor to identify Atkins in court.
“Yes, he’s wearing a gray shirt,” the boy told jurors.
“Sometimes he helped me with math and social studies,” he said. The two ate lunch together, attended field trips together, and spoke throughout the day, he said.
But on other occasions, prosecutors charge, the behavior began to cross the line, beginning with hugging and massages.
“Sometimes he’d massage my feet — sometimes he asked me to take off my shoes and run around the auditorium a few times,” the boy told jurors.
On subsequent occasions, inside a bathroom stall, “he asked me if I wanted to strip, and I didn’t know what to say, so I did,” he said. “His excuse was to check me for bruises.”
Asked why he repeatedly complied with the requests to “get naked,” the boy shifted in his seat nervously.
“Because, well, there was two reasons,” he told jurors. “First, I couldn’t find any other reasonable answer and two was that , well, this might sound weird, but I didn’t want to upset him.”
But when Atkins began massaging him in a corner of the empty auditorium one day, “It felt creepy,” he told jurors.
“I told him ‘shut up!'” the boy said, his voice loud and angry as he described standing up to the alleged monster. Later that day, he told his therapist, the boy testified.
Atkins was indicted last February on charges of first degree sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child; in September, prosecutors added new charges: ten counts of possessing child pornography for ten sickening images allegedly found on his home computer.
He remains held in lieu of $250,000 bail. After his arrest, school authorities acknowledged that Atkins had been hired at PS 87 despite having been accused of acting inappropriately with another young student at MS 322 in 2006.
Atkins was verbally reprimanded in that incident for giving a boy inappropriate gifts, including a jock strap.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott has said that the 2006 incident had gone under the radar because it had resulted only in a verbal, not a written, reprimand.