By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — An NYPD officer charged with acting as a lookout while another officer raped a woman in her East Village apartment testified Monday morning that his partner is not the type of man to do such a thing.
"I know Ken," Franklin Mata, 29, testified during cross-examination Monday morning, speaking of his partner Kenneth Moreno. "Ken wouldn't do something like that."
Assistant District Attorney Coleen Balbert pressed Mata, who has been on the witness stand since Friday, about what he knew of the bedroom encounter.
"Did he tell you anything?" Balbert asked.
"Did he tell me anything about what?" Mata said.
"What was going on inside of the bedroom," the prosecutor clarified.
"No, ma'am."
Mata testified that he was dozing off on the woman's couch while she and Moreno were alone in the bedroom. He also said he didn't hear or see anything amiss.
The defense has not conceded that any sex occurred between the woman and Moreno, and there is no DNA evidence to support that it did — just the woman's recollection.
But Mata had testified that the 27-year-old woman was "flirty" with Moreno, and attorneys for the officers have argued anything that may have happened was consensual, but erased from her memory by an alcohol-induced "blackout."
Surveillance video shows the officers made four trips throughout the night to the woman's apartment. At first they said the trips were meant to make sure she was OK, but on Friday Mata admitted that they returned because she and Moreno had developed a "rapport."
Mata also claimed that the woman was "touching [Moreno] on his arm" and "giggling" while vomiting in the bathroom.
"I heard laughing in there. It seemed flirty to me," the officer told the jury.
Balbert suggested there was no "official police business" going on inside the woman's bedroom, but that she was vomiting and visibly intoxicated and in need of medical attention, which the officers did not call for.
She also tried to discredit his claim about his partner not being someone who would "do something like" committing a rape.
She pointed to Mata's own admission, in Friday's testimony, about a fake phone call Moreno made from a pay phone, purporting to be a citizen making a police report about a homeless man in a vestibule, conveniently on the same block as the alleged victim's apartment.
Prosecutors say the call was made to buy them another undocumented trip to her building.
Both officers are charged with rape, official misconduct and burglary.
