12419: NY times: Witness Admits forgery in Louima Battry Trial (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Witness Against Schwarz Admits to Forgery in 1992
By ANDY NEWMAN


 10-year-old lie by Sgt. Eric Turetzky, one of the main
prosecution witnesses in the Abner Louima brutality case,
came back to haunt him as he testified in federal court in
Brooklyn yesterday during the latest trial of former
Officer Charles Schwarz.

Sergeant Turetzky said that he had forged paperwork to
inflate his credentials in 1992 when he was a 21-year-old
apprentice in a hospital's paramedic program, and as a
result he was forced to withdraw from the program. He said
that he was now being investigated by the Police
Department's Internal Affairs Bureau over the forgeries,
and that he had notified Internal Affairs of the incident
recently, when he learned that Mr. Schwarz's lawyer, Ronald
P. Fischetti, had subpoenaed his old records and that the
forgeries were likely to come up at trial.

In bringing up the forgeries, Mr. Fischetti was apparently
trying to taint the credibility of Sergeant Turetzky, who
has testified in four separate trials that he saw Mr.
Schwarz escort Mr. Louima toward the bathroom in the 70th
Precinct station house where Officer Justin A. Volpe
attacked Mr. Louima on Aug. 9, 1997.

Mr. Schwarz is being tried for the third time on charges
that he helped Officer Volpe assault Mr. Louima. His
convictions in two previous trials were overturned. He is
also charged with perjury. Mr. Schwarz says he did not lead
Mr. Louima to the bathroom and had no part in the assault.

The discussion of Sergeant Turetzky's past was the only
substantially new material in a day dominated by his
testimony and that of another officer, Sgt. Mark Schofield.
Their accounts, which have been given several times before,
included testimony that they saw Mr. Schwarz escort Mr.
Louima to the bathroom.

Sergeant Turetzky said yesterday that in 1992, when he was
a student at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, he was also training as a paramedic in a program run
by University Hospital at Stony Brook. He said he had
friends forge doctors' signatures on documents saying that
he had gone on 32 hours of clinical observations, when he
had not.

When he applied to become a police officer in 1995,
Sergeant Turetzky did not mention the incident, he said
yesterday, even though the application asked whether he had
ever been disciplined at any "educational institution" he
attended.

"I didn't feel that was a college," he said of the
paramedic program.

As in past trials, Mr. Fischetti also focused the jury's
attention on discrepancies between Sergeant Turetzky's and
Sergeant Schofield's versions of events the night Mr.
Louima was assaulted. Sergeant Turetzky says he saw Mr.
Louima with his pants down around his ankles and no
underwear, being led toward the bathroom by Mr. Schwarz and
no one else. Sergeant Schofield says Mr. Louima was wearing
boxer shorts and that both Mr. Schwarz and Mr. Volpe were
leading him toward the bathroom.


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