The Brooklyn man who claims cops sodomized him inside a Flatbush subway station calmly told jurors this morning how the officers tackled him to the ground, cuffed him and kicked him before violating him with a retractable baton.
“I felt a hard object being forced into my crack,” said Michael Mineo, 25, calmly directing his gaze at jurors and avoiding the stares of the three officers on trial. “It was pain. I was disorientated. I saw white light. … It was one, two, three, then it stopped for a second, then I felt it go in, penetrate.”
Under questioning by Assistant DA Charles Guria, Mineo — an admitted Crips gang member with a substantial rap sheet — deftly related details of the attack, raising his voice only when asked to simulate for the jury how he screamed for help to passers-by.
“I was like, ‘Help me! They stuck something in my a–!'” Mineo thundered into the microphone in the witness box.
Mineo couldn’t say who was doing what to him as he lay cuffed on the floor of the Prospect Park subway station, but prosecutors have said other evidence will show that Officer Richard Kern, 26, wielded the baton.
Two others, Andrew Morales, 27, and Alex Cruz, 28, allegedly tried to help cover up the attack.
Mineo admitted he was smoking a pot-laced cigar as he walked from his Rogers Avenue apartment towards a dollar van stop on Oct. 15, 2008. He said he swallowed the cigar stub when cops approached.
When it became clear he’d be arrested, he said he made a break for it because he wasn’t carrying ID and thus would have to be locked up overnight, rather than simply issued a ticket.
He fled onto the platform of the nearby station, missed the train, and ran back up a staircase, only to be decked by Cruz, he testified.
That’s when the others put him on the ground.
After the attack, he said he asked the cops if they put something in his rectum.
“You liked it, you f—–,” Cruz shot back, he claimed.
Mineo said he reached his cuffed hands down under his pants and found blood. When he showed it to the officers, he was offered a deal.
“Look, you help me out, I help you out,” he said Kern told him. “If we let you go, you can’t go to a precinct or a hospital. But if you do, we have your address. We’ll put a felony on you.”
Prosecutors introduced into evidence a the summons the cops issued Mineo for disorderly conduct — a bogus ticket they say was Mineo’s “reward” for promising not to report the incident.
Mineo also admitted he’d filed a $440 million lawsuit in connection with the incident, but asked if he knew if he’d ever see a dime, maintained, “I have no idea.”