NEW YORK -- One frigid morning in January 2019, a New York University student woke up in her apartment near the school's Manhattan campus to find a masked man standing over her in bed. He told her not to scream, she told investigators, and then he held her down and raped her.Two months later, police
NEW YORK — One frigid morning in January 2019, a New York University student woke up in her apartment near the school’s Manhattan campus to find a masked man standing over her in bed. He told her not to scream, she told investigators, and then he held her down and raped her.
Those errors underscored a long-standing problem identified in a scathing city audit in 2018: Some of the division’s detectives, facing heavy caseloads and a lack of resources, discourage rape victims from cooperating and push to close cases without a full investigation. Story continuesCommissioner Dermot Shea, when he was chief of detectives last year, denied the rape investigation involving Lockett had been mishandled. Last summer, he blamed Brooklyn prosecutors for the fiasco, pointing out they let Lockett plead guilty and enter a diversion program rather than insisting on a jail sentence.
The NYU student’s mother, who was with her daughter at the police questioning, said a senior sex-crimes detective, William McLaughlin, doubted her daughter’s story of being raped and talked her out of cooperating with the investigation by telling her — falsely — that her identity would become public if she did.
The detective, however, seemed skeptical of her account, asking her whether she knew her attacker or had let him into her apartment, the victim’s mother said. State civil rights law guarantees a sexual assault victims’ rights to privacy and anonymity. Victims’ names are withheld in court documents, and most professional news organizations do not identify victims without their permission. New York’s rape shield law also forbids defense lawyers from asking a victim about unrelated sexual activity.Harrison said that investigators began considering Lockett as a possible suspect in the rape soon after he was arrested on burglary charges in Brooklyn.
Law enforcement officials said the fingerprint match should have led to several investigative steps, but Harrison said they were not taken. No one visited the victim to persuade her to go forward. Nor did police call the Brooklyn prosecutors overseeing the burglary cases. In addition, investigators did not ask corrections officials to inform them if Lockett was released from jail.
Investigators also decided against speaking to Lockett about the rape while he was in jail, Harrison said, because Manhattan prosecutors advised them Lockett had a right to have a lawyer present.
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