City police officer Eric Peters held his girlfriend’s neck, hitting her in the face multiple times inside a parked truck on Park Place last March, a prosecutor told a City Court jury this morning.
Peters’ defense attorney Kevin Luibrand, though, countered that there was an argument, but nothing more. Anything that contradicts that is either false, mistaken or clouded by alcohol, he said.
Peters, 37, now of Albany, is standing trial in City Court on one count each of second-degree unlawful imprisonment and third-degree attempted assault, both misdemeanors.
He is accused of holding his girlfriend, Bonnie Hathaway-Crandall, inside a car and trying to assault her on March 17, 2011.
Peters has maintained his innocence. Hathaway-Crandall has also denied anything happened. She has also maintained that any injury present that day was due to a dancing mishap earlier in the evening, for which she said there were witnesses.
Prosecutor Christina Tremante-Pelham confirmed to the jury that Peters’ girlfriend will not testify for the prosecution.
But the prosecutor argued there are two witnesses who saw the incident, as they walked from their nearby apartment. There were also scratches seen on the woman’s neck by a city police investigator.
Peters also showed “consciousness of guilt” by going to the police station that night, while off duty, and asking dispatchers if there was a call to Park Place that night.
When told there was, but it had been canceled, Peters smirked and said “good,” prosecutor Christina Tremante-Pelham said.
The call had been canceled due to an apparent miscommunication between agencies. The two witnesses who saw the attack knew Peters to be a city police officer and didn’t trust calling the city police. They instead called Union College Campus Safety, according to the prosecution.
The witnesses followed up the next day, and an investigation was begun, Tremante-Pelham said.
As for what the witnesses saw, Tremante-Pelham said it was specific.
“Eric Peters grabbed his girlfriend by the neck, cocked his arm back and punched her in the face multiple times, her head jolting side to side as he did this,” Tremante-Pelham told the jury, “he then held her in the car so she couldn’t get out.”
Luibrand argued that the two witnesses had been “drinking to get drunk” that night.
More important, Peters did not lay a finger on his girlfriend. From where the witnesses were, it wasn’t possible for them to see inside the truck, Luibrand said.
“They didn’t see what they claim they saw,” the lawywer said.
Luibrand did not address Peters’ alleged trip to the city police dispatch that night.
The case is being heard before City Court Judge Mark Blanchfield
Peters was suspended after his March arrest.
He is a decorated officer who has been injured on the job. His work saving a man and the man’s daughter from a burning Yale Street home in 2003 earned him an exceptional duty award at a 2005 ceremony.
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