DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — It was supposed to be a romantic spring vacation to New York City for a couple in a long-distance relationship.
Instead, Virginia native Emily Weber got embroiled in a chaotic scuffle with police officers in a subway station, ending her visit with a four-day stay on Rikers Island and a conviction for disorderly conduct.
Weber thought her boyfriend was being mugged when transit officers approached him after he jumped a turnstile at the Morgan Avenue L train stop — a crime she said was necessary because the station's MetroCard machine was broken.
The daughter of a Navy attaché told DNAinfo Friday, after she pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, that she and her boyfriend Alexander Telinde, 21, had a meal and visited friends in Brooklyn before catching the train back to their Airbnb on April 12, 2016.
Telinde, who met Weber in high school, couldn't add money to his MetroCard and leapt over the turnstile while she swiped herself in, she said.
Almost instantly, two plainclothes officers appeared and ordered the pair against the wall, she recounted.
Weber — who at the time was visiting from Russia, where she was working at the U.S. embassy — said she'd been attacked three times before on the subway in Moscow and panicked.
"Instead of giving me my right to know who they were, they acted shifty and separated the two of us," she explained.
She said she offered to pay the fare, then told the officers that she was going call the police before trying to run for the stairs. That's when a female officer caught her, she said.
"The woman chased me down and tackled me down and sat on my back," Weber said.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend began fighting with the other officer.
Prosecutors said he grabbed a baton from an officer's belt and used it to hit him on the head, shoulder, face and knees.
He then yanked at the shield dangling from the officer's neck, causing him to choke, authorities said. He ultimately pleaded guilty to third-degree assault charges.
Weber declined to comment on what Telinde had done during the scuffle, and he couldn't be reached for comment. She said the couple is still together, but that he had been taking the incident very hard.
After their arrest, Weber spent a night in the precinct and another four on Rikers Island.
Once inside the city jail, Weber said other inmates were kind to her.
"Just keep your head low, you might get assaulted," they'd warned her, schooling her about the infamous jail.
They were also curious about what she was doing there, she said.
"It's pretty unusual to see someone of my age and background," she said.
A week later, after her father Geoffrey Weber, a Navy Lieutenant Commander, had bailed her out, the two of them returned to the Morgan Avenue L train stop and saw the ticket machine was still broken, she said.
She also said she saw a man trying to pay before jumping the turnstile and getting arrested.
The MTA didn't confirm when the ticket machine had been broken and police couldn't say if they'd arrested someone for turnstile jumping on April 17, the day Weber said she and her father visited the station.
"What Alex and Emily had to go through is shocking and sad when you start to question the integrity of our police departments around the U.S.," said Weber's father, 49.
"It's confusing and it's scary. And we're middle class and fairly educated. To me it's a sad state of the NYPD. We saw a sorry underbelly."
Weber has since returned to the U.S., but she said the experience made her abandon plans to attend college upstate.
She's instead studying at community college in Rhode Island and hopes to one day work as an investigative journalist, inspired in part by the kind women she met on Rikers Island.
"Even though I did everything humanly possible to do right and respect the process, it'll always be their word against mine," she said.
All felony charges have since been dropped against Weber, who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct Friday after completing 10 days community service in her home state.
