At N.Y. Officers’ Trial, Haitian Describes Assault

Haitian immigrant Abner Louima told a jury Thursday that police officers who arrested him in 1997 took turns beating him before one sexually brutalized him with a stick in a police station bathroom.

The enraged officer rammed the stick up Louima’s rectum and then jammed it in Louima’s mouth, he said in a halting voice at the federal trial of five white officers charged with violating his civil rights.

The incident prompted demonstrations against police brutality and inflamed racial tensions in the city.

Taking the stand on the third day of the trial, Louima, 32, at one point was asked to rise and identify the officer. He slowly scanned the courtroom before pointing at Officer Justin Volpe. Louima’s finger shook visibly; Volpe sat expressionless.

After the attack, Louima testified, Volpe warned Louima that if he “ever talked to anyone about what they did to me, he’d kill me and my family and he was not joking.”

Volpe is one of four officers charged with beating Louima after mistakenly thinking he had sucker-punched Volpe as police tried to disperse a rowdy crowd outside a Brooklyn nightclub on Aug. 9, 1997; a fifth officer is charged with covering up the assault. Prosecutors revealed this week that Louima’s cousin is the man who punched Volpe.

Volpe also is accused of sodomizing Louima in a fit of rage. Louima was hospitalized with severe internal injuries.

Louima, who is unemployed, told jurors he had filed a $155-million lawsuit against the city.