By Jeremy Walsh
The girlfriend of state Sen. Hiram Monserrate (D-East Elmhurst) broke down in tears while viewing video footage during a full day of tense questioning from prosecutors hoping to convict him of assault.
“Do I have to watch this?” Karla Giraldo, 30, asked Judge William Erlbaum after watching a security camera tape of herself running down the stairs of Monserrate’s Jackson Heights apartment building Dec. 19 with him hot on her heels.
She then left the courtroom to calm down, ending the most dramatic moment in a day otherwise filled with tense but mundane questions from prosecutor Scott Kessler, who had previously said he was unsure whether he would call her to the stand.
Monserrate and Giraldo got into a fight last December over another man’s police union card Monserrate found in her purse. Medical staff from North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital testified she told them that Monserrate deliberately thrust the glass into her face during the argument, resulting in wounds that required between 35 and 40 stitches. Giraldo has since recanted that story, claiming the injury was an accident and that doctors and police were overeager to disgrace Monserrate.
She was visibly scornful of Kessler and at one point said she did not trust him, but Judge William Erlbaum refused Kessler’s request to treat Giraldo as a hostile witness. The decision led to a series of rambling, evasive answers and repeated questions from Kessler.
“All right, if I rang the bell, why is the neighbor not shown on the video?” she asked Kessler at one point, prompting Erlbaum to instruct her sternly to answer, not ask questions.
Kessler’s most interesting extraction from Giraldo was that she had undergone elective surgery more than once in the past, weakening the defense’s contention that Giraldo is seen on the video resisting Monserrate because she was terrified of needles and hospitals.
Kessler also pointed out numerous instances in which Giraldo’s testimony contradicted what she had told a grand jury several months earlier.
Wherever possible on Wednesday, Giraldo inserted into her answers that she had been drunk that night and her injury was an accident, though Kessler pointed out she had testified to a grand jury that she was not drunk that night. Giraldo explained she had not understood the question when on the stand the previous time.
It was unclear, however, how it would benefit prosecutors, who have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Monserrate deliberately cut her face open.
“I don’t think they came close to making out a case beyond reasonable doubt,” said Joseph Tacopina, Monserrate’s lawyer.
Giraldo also testified that she told Dr. Dawne Kort that the injury was an accident and Kort, a bilingual doctor with Puerto Rican and Panamanian parents, had misunderstood her Spanish.
Kessler took great pains not to ask Giraldo about how she was injured, which would have opened the door to cross-examination on the subject.
“They didn’t ask her one question about how she got the cut,” Tacopina said.
Reach reporter Jeremy Walsh by e-mail at jewalsh@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
