By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times
A Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officer was charged yesterday with beating a homeless man with a nightstick after ejecting him from Pennsylvania Station on a frigid night in January.
The officer, Michael Koenig, pleaded not guilty to a charge of felony assault at his arraignment in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The police sergeant on duty during the assault, Joseph Camean, is accused of failing to record the incident in an official log, and Officer Koenig faces the same charge .
According to prosecutors, Officer Koenig and two other officers were on patrol in Penn Station about 3 a.m. on Jan. 18, when they ejected the homeless man, Maurice Cherry. Soon after, Officer Koenig began to argue with Mr. Cherry outside the station, and hit him several times in the head with his expandable metal nightstick, prosecutors said.
Mr. Cherry was given three stitches at a hospital, but was otherwise not seriously injured, said the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau.
“According to witnesses, the victim was doing nothing at the time and went into a fetal position when the officer assaulted him,” said an assistant district attorney, Andrew Heffner."There was absolutely no justification for the assault.”
James DiPietro, a lawyer for Sergeant Camean, said in a telephone interview that his client was inside Penn Station at the time the assault is said to have occurred, and did not see it. Sergeant Camean was later notified of the incident, prosecutors said, and is being charged with falsifying business records. They say he did not record the attack in a log.
Two people who were getting into a taxi after an evening out saw the incident and reported it, prosecutors said, and the M.T.A.'s Internal Affairs Bureau began to investigate.
Officer Koenig, 34, and Sergeant Camean, 32, were both suspended from duty without pay early this spring, pending the outcome of the investigation, said an M.T.A. spokesman, Tom Kelly. Officer Koenig faces a maximum of seven years in prison and Sergeant Camean faces four years.
Officer Koenig’s lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg - who also represented Justin Volpe, the police officer convicted of sodomizing Abner Louima in a police station house bathroom in 1997 - said in an interview that the two other officers at the scene that night, who were not charged, might receive immunity in exchange for testifying against Mr. Koenig.
Prosecutors declined to comment on Mr. Kornberg’s statement, saying only that Officer Koenig, who has been on the force for about four years, was the only officer involved in the assault.
The next court appearance for both men was set for Nov. 18.