NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Two officers were fired from the NYPD for raping a teen girl who was part of the department’s Explorer program to “satisfy their depraved interests,” an internal department judge ruled.
According to a ruling made public last week, officers Yaser Shohatee and Sanad Musallam's “shocking professional and sexual misconduct” including actions that “would cause any responsible adult, let alone a parent, to recoil in horror,” the NYPD judge wrote.
The 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,” assistant deputy commissioner of trials Paul Gamble wrote in a 41-page ruling.
Disciplinary documents said that officers Musallam and Shohatee now 34 and 41, “targeted’’ the girl, who was 15 at the time, and separately raped her along with dozens of phone chats as well as hundreds of text message exchanges including “sexually explicit” photos, between 2015 and 2016.
Shohatee solicited photos from the girl on Snapchat in early 2016, asking her if she “would be down to have sex”, the documents add.
He also had the 15-year-old girl over to his apartment late at night at least twice between November 2015 and May 2016, according to the ruling.
Shohatee also sent a cab to pick up the girl at her house and then to take her back home hours later, and exchanged 857 texts, the docs added.
Both officers “have been found guilty of shocking professional and sexual misconduct,” Gamble added.
He recommended dismissing both officers after finding them guilty along with other internal misconduct charges.
“While investigating the trafficking of a teenage girl, our office learned of troubling allegations that she was sexually abused by two police officers years earlier,” said Oren Yaniv, a spokesman for Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez. “While the young victim repeatedly refused to participate in any criminal or other legal proceedings, we referred our findings to the Internal Affairs bureau, ultimately leading to the officers’ termination.”
Both officers denied the allegations and remained on the force with full pay until they were fired on March 25, four years after the allegations were reported to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
The officers were fired three weeks after Gamble’s ruling, according to disciplinary records.
Neither officer faced criminal charges after the teen refused to continue cooperating with investigators, Yaniv added.