By Don Kaplan
The New York Post
NEW YORK — She hoped the twisted rapist would take the bait and call her - and cops were ready when he did.
In an astounding tape-recorded telephone exchange, a gutsy Queens waitress coolly played the man who had viciously raped her, coaxing him to confess his heinous attack and wrenching out a twisted apology.
“I hoped he would call so I could set him up with the police,” the 5-foot-2-inch, 115-pound woman told a stunned courtroom yesterday before jurors listened in silence to the several-minute-long taped conversation with her alleged knifepoint attacker, Timothy West.
“Yeah, what’s goin’, girl?” West, 26, is heard asking. “Some police to my sister’s crib all lookin’ for me . . . So, you mad at me?”
The horrified victim responds, “What do you mean, I’m mad at you? Of course, you know, I don’t know you like that, and just over here, raping me and everything with a knife in your hand. Damn! What you gotta say about that?”
“Sorry. I apologize,” he answered.
With three detectives listening in, West asked if she accepted his apology and begged her not to tell anyone what had happened.
“Do you understand what you did to me? Like, has it hit you what you’ve done to me?” she asked.
West is on trial for allegedly breaking into an Ozone Park home and raping the cool-headed 21-year-old woman twice over the course of three agonizing hours. She then tricked him into texting her later - setting West up for a tape-recorded phone conversation, with cops listening in, and then a meeting at Dunkin’ Donuts, where he was busted.
“Were you drunk? Were you high? Was it because he was your consensual partner and you wanted him to stay?” West’s attorney, Mihea Kim, demanded in a cross-examination that capped the woman’s second day on the stand.
“I just wanted to cooperate with him so he would leave,” she calmly answered.
“You did not run? You did not scream bloody murder?” Kim asked.
“I felt like I was handling the situation,” the victim said. “I felt like I had it under control.”
The victim, a waitress at Applebee’s, has testified she cooperated with West and did not scream or fight back because she was worried about what would happen to her mother and brother, who were asleep in the house when the March 2009 assault began.
“What did you think would happen if you tried to run away?” Assistant District Attorney Frank Degaetano roared in a fiery rebuttal.
“He was going to stab me,” the visibly shaken victim said.
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Excerpt of recorded phone conversation between Timothy West and his alleged rape victim:
Victim: “Wait, so hold on, let’s get something clear right now . . . You just broke into my house . . . I’ve never seen you before.”
Timothy West: “I know, man, that s- - -t is crazy. I apologize, though.”
Victim: “But do you understand what you did to me? Like, has it hit you what you’ve done to me? Like, how do you expect me to be cool with you, and just expect a simple apology. I’ve never seen you before, and you just walk up to my house with a pocket knife, and then you didn’t find anything from me, no money, so you raped me! And then you expect me to be cool with that the next day? I mean, what’s up with that?”
West: “So, I can’t call you no more?”
Victim: “Wow, I don’t even know what to tell you, but . . . can you answer me seriously, how, like, what made you want to come in and break into my house? Why . . . my house?”
West: ". . . It was just, like, random.”
Victim: “Like you never spied on me, stalked on me or something?”
West: “Nah, nah, man. I’m serious. It’s random.”
Timothy West.
Copyright 2010 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc.