Scarred but defiant, she took the stand and recounted a nightmare scenario for a woman taking a taxi alone at night: waking up with the cabbie raping her at knifepoint.
“He said, ‘Do you want to live? Listen to me. Stop talking,’” the 29-year-old woman said in a Brooklyn courtroom late last week.
“I was trying to personalize the situation so I was asking about his family,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that something like this was happening.”
The spine-tingling testimony came at the trial of father-of-two Gurmeet Singh, 42, who’s charged with brutally violating the woman in May 2011.
The witness described how a foul-smelling sicko tied her hands with a scarf, stuffed her mouth with paper towels and blindfolded her eyes with a sleep mask. He then raped her.
“I thought I was going to get killed,” she said through tears Thursday. She then had to take a break and step out to compose herself.
“Can I have a minute, please?” she asked. “Stop.”
A non-profit worker who now lives on the West Coast, the woman had just finished a night out at two Williamsburg hotspots, Sea restaurant and the music venue Public Assembly, when she hailed a yellow taxi at about 4 a.m. She remembered fiddling with her phone before dozing off in the back seat on the way to her East Village flat.
“I was tired,” she said. “And I was also, you know, I think trusted that I would just be driven home.”
But instead she was roused by the frightening sight of a man with “a reddish orange turban … a beard and body odor smell” on top of her, a knife to her neck, the cab parked on a desolate street by the highway.
She pleaded, “Don’t do this, sir. Let’s go to the ATM” until the cabbie finally released her, she said during the emotional, daylong testimony in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He took off with her cell phone and $ 20, leaving her with cuts to the chest and busted lips.
Defense attorney Collin Moore tried to poke holes in the victim’s account and suggested she was intoxicated after having about five drinks that night.
I thought I was going to get killed.
Singh took the stand himself Monday and incredibly claimed the woman refused to leave his cab at her home, silently stayed in the taxi as he drove back to Jamaica, Queens, to return it then hopped into his private SUV.
There, she seduced him into having sex, he said, demanded money and got mad when he refused.
“I didn’t force her to do anything,” he maintained.
His testimony allowed prosecutor Linda Weinman to grill him about an incident in September 2011 that ultimately led to his capture.
In that case, Singh was accused of molesting a drunk woman in Harlem and had told detectives she voluntarily gave him oral sex, an account he repeated in court.
The Manhattan woman’s complaint revived the Brooklyn case, which had dead-ended after an initial investigation.
Cops zeroed in on Singh and shrewdly tricked him into coming for a talk at the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s Queens office, where an undercover officer got him to drink water from a Styrofoam cup.
“Just before the defendant left, I proposed, ‘We’ll raise a toast because the meeting went well,’” testified the now-retired detective, Luis Velazco.
DNA from the cup matched fluids left in the Williamsburg rape and GPS data placed the cab Singh was driving in the area.
He was never charged with the alleged Harlem assault
Singh, who’s been driving a cab since 1995, is facing 25 years to life in prison if convicted for the top count of predatory sexual assault.
The trial is expected to conclude this week.
Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News
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