Officer Fired After N.Y.P.D. Finds He Raped Girl From Youth Program

Two New York Police Department officers were fired this year after a disciplinary trial judge wrote that they had engaged in “shocking professional and sexual misconduct” with a teenage girl who was a member of one of the department’s youth programs, departmental records show.

The two former officers, Yaser Shohatee and Sanad Musallam, had sexual contact with the girl, who was 15 at the time of most of the events, the records say, and together exchanged more than 1,500 texts with her over the course of more than a year, some of which included sexually explicit messages.

The girl was interviewed by state prosecutors as part of a sex trafficking investigation, but stopped cooperating, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney. Mr. Shohatee, who is now 41, and Mr. Musallam, 34, were not criminally charged, but prosecutors referred their findings to the Police Department’s internal affairs bureau, and the two were tried together.

The department trial judge’s recommendation that the officers be dismissed was handed down in early March, and the two were each terminated three weeks later, records show.

Paul Gamble, the assistant deputy commissioner of trials who presided over the trial, wrote that the two officers “individually targeted the minor as a particularly vulnerable individual they were morally obliged to protect but chose to take advantage of to satisfy their depraved interests.”

A lawyer for Mr. Shohatee did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the former officer could not be reached on Wednesday. But Roger Blank, a lawyer for Mr. Musallam, said that his client had never had an inappropriate relationship or engaged in sexual acts with the girl.

Mr. Blank said he had requested that the two officers’ trials be held separately, because of the varied scope of the evidence against them, but that was not granted. Both men had pleaded not guilty.

“In today’s world, the allegation is enough. The allegation that you did something wrong is enough to ruin careers and ruin livelihoods,” Mr. Blank said in an interview on Wednesday. “And I believe the department lacked the political courage to make the right legal decision, and made what was the expedient political decision.”

The officers’ case was among the hundreds of disciplinary decisions described in previously secret documents that the Police Department began releasing this year. After last year’s mass protests over police brutality, New York lawmakers repealed a decades-old law that kept the discipline records of officers secret.

Since March, the department has published several hundred decisions from its internal trials.

Mr. Shohatee and Mr. Musallam had each been on the job for more than 10 years, records suggest, and had worked in the 68th Precinct, which includes parts of the Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

The bulk of their interactions with the teenager took place after she had become a participant in the department’s Explorers initiative, a program to teach youth about law enforcement, in the fall of 2015, according to the records.

Mr. Shohatee said at the trial that he had spoken with the girl, believed she was troubled and offered her advice. He testified that he wanted to help mentor her as a school resource officer had done for him, according to the trial documents, and began to chat with her on Snapchat and over text.

But the girl, in an interview with department investigators in June 2018, said that Mr. Shohatee began to request photos of her and asked whether she “would be down to have sex,” the records say. The two later had several “clandestine” meetings late at night or early in the morning, the records say, and the teenager said in another interview in 2017 that she had sex with Mr. Shohatee “four of five times at his apartment,” according to the records — conduct that Mr. Gamble wrote was statutory rape.

The girl told investigators that the former officer would drop her at home around 4 or 5 a.m. before her father awoke.

Mr. Shohatee testified that he had seen the teenager three times in 2015 and 2016 after 10 p.m., including twice at his apartment and once in his car, according to the records. But he said that the visits were initiated by the teenager, often after she reached out to him about problems at home, lasted only 10 to 30 minutes and did not involve sexual contact.

But Mr. Gamble, in his written recommendation that the officers be fired, appeared not to believe Mr. Shohatee’s explanation.

“The insidious and sinister nature of his repeated actions would cause any responsible adult, let alone a parent, to recoil in horror,” he wrote.

A Police Department spokeswoman said on Wednesday that there was “zero tolerance in the N.Y.P.D. for corruption of any kind” and that the officers were “disgracefully violating their oaths of office and the public trust.”

“We applaud the fact that it is as a result of an internal N.Y.P.D. disciplinary trial that these individuals are no longer members of this Police Department,” Detective Sophia Mason, the spokeswoman, said in a statement. The trial records say both officers were placed on modified assignment in June 2018, following the teenager’s interview with the internal affairs bureau and special victims unit, but the department did not provide additional details.

The Police Benevolent Association, which represents about 24,000 rank-and-file officers, did not return a request for comment on Wednesday.

During a sex trafficking investigation around 2017, the girl had been interviewed by state prosecutors in Brooklyn and made accusations against the officers, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney said.

But she stopped speaking with prosecutors around the end of 2018, and the office referred its findings to the Police Department’s internal affairs bureau.

In Mr. Musallam’s case, the former officer said he first met the girl when responding to a 911 call for a missing person that was made by her mother. The girl’s mother told investigators she later asked him to help mentor her daughter, who struggled with substance abuse issues and was later suspended from the youth program, and asked if she could give Mr. Musallam’s phone number to the teenager, the records say.

In her interviews with investigators, the teenager said that Mr. Musallam asked her to engage in oral sex with him, which she refused to do; he then asked if she would perform a sex act with her hand, which she said she did.

At the trial, Mr. Musallam “emphatically denied” sexual contact or any close physical contact with the teenager, according to the records.

He said the girl had texted him that she was considering self-harm and needed to speak with him. Around 11:30 p.m., he testified, he arrived at her home and said that the teenager got into his car’s passenger seat, while the mother was outside about ten feet away. His vehicle’s windows were not tinted, the records say, and he testified that she was in his vehicle for less than five minutes before he left.

Mr. Gamble was not swayed by his explanation and wrote in the recommendation that Mr. Musallam had abused the family’s trust by “taking advantage of a vulnerable individual’s immature impulses, all while portraying himself as a noble actor.”

“The potential psychological damage brought about by his misconduct defies precise calculation,” he wrote.