For Port Richmond man, bogus rape charge dropped, but the damage persists

5-18-2010 New York:

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - An innocent man's nightmare is over.

It's time for Adrian Angevin to get back to doing what he does best -- working with developmentally disabled adults.

"Hopefully I can get a job back," Adrian, 36, says. "With the economy the way it is, I have to go on. But it's tough because the allegations were so ugly."

Ugly? Those charges concocted by a 16-year-old girl who claimed Adrian tried to rape her in the Staten Island Mall's parking lot were brutal.

"I'd been working for eight years, taking care of my two sons, and supporting my daughter who lives in Florida," Adrian says of his old job at the Lifespire adult residence in New Springville.

A Lifespire staffer told me the Port Richmond resident was "a good guy" who never had any problems there until he "disappeared" in November.

"We didn't know what happened to him," the staffer said. "We heard he went to California."

They heard wrong.

Since Lifespire provides care to mentally-challenged adults, the attempted rape charge flew in the face of the company's code of ethics. When the charges came to light, Lifespire reps -- including Adrian's supervisor Joanne McClein -- sat down with his union delegate and agreed to let him resign.

"My [boss] told me that I either had to resign or they would fire me because of the allegations," Adrian recalls. "I didn't know what to do, so I resigned."

The teen girl who lobbed a bomb on Adrian's job told Det. William Wasson and Assistant District Attorney Anthony Katchen she fought off a man who threw a coat over her head and attacked her in the Mall's lot on May 19 last year.

Then she fingered Adrian as her attacker, the man who had stared at her, licked his lips and mouthed nasties on the S44 bus to Port Richmond High School a few dozen times between September 2008 and May 19, 2009.

Adrian admitted riding the S44 to and from work and his home near Port Richmond High School. But there were canyons in the girls' story.

That night she told responding Officer Nayron Garcia she was "followed by an unknown person, who was screaming at her," but never said a word about having a coat thrown over her head or being grabbed, as she later told Wasson.

"Officer Garcia told me ... he would have recorded those details on the complaint report," Katchen wrote in his report.

She also said she used her student Metrocard to pay for the bus. But there was no record of a student Metrocard issued to the girl for the September 2008 school term.

And she bragged of "good" attendance at Port Richmond High School.

But the Department of Education said the girl wasn't enrolled at Port Richmond High School during the 2008-2009 school year.

The girl said she recognized Adrian on a bus she rode with a student Metrocard she didn't have on her way to a school she didn't attend.

So Katchen canned the case. Why waste another second preparing a she-said-he-said trial for a she-said who really didn't know what she was saying?

"Proof that the contact was criminal or sexual in nature rests solely on the testimony of [the girl], whose credibility has been severely undermined by the relevant documentary evidence," Katchen wrote in his recommendation for dismissal.

When a judge tossed the case recently nobody was less surprised than Adrian's attorney Mario Gallucci. "I have said from day one that my client was not guilty of these charges," Gallucci said.

Just don't look for any follow-up perjury charges anytime soon. A cop friend cited an unwritten rule that you don't lock up a rape victim even if they're lying because you don't want to scare future rape victims from coming forward.

All that's left is for Adrian to try to forget three months of getting brewed, stewed and crucified by a jailhouse bunch that treats accused rapists like the stuff they kick off the soles of their bathroom flip-flops, innocent until proven guilty their behind.

"That, right there, was a nightmare," says Adrian, who could have faced the same hell for a max 15 years had he been convicted.

Now he faces job interviewers asking, "Mr. Angevin, what have you been doing lately?"

"I have been incarcerated, sir."

"Why?"

"A girl accused me of attempted rape, but ..."

"Thank you ... Next..."

Some might not even waste a thank you, innocent until proven guilty their behind.

"Hopefully, I can get back to work," Adrian says. "I don't see why I can't."

Me neither. ..Source.. Jeff Harrell