A girl who had a sexual relationship with accused rapist Gary Zerola and is likely one of the finest pals of his alleged sufferer, and was sharing the identical sofa the place the alleged crime passed off seven years in the past, took the stand on the second day of Zerola’s trial.
“I woke up to (the alleged victim) shaking me,” Colleen Daley, 29, mentioned in a solution to considered one of prosecutor Ian Polumbaum’s questions Wednesday at Suffolk Superior Court in downtown Boston. “She was very serious and said ‘Get up, we’re leaving.’”
Daley had been a former shopper of Zerola, 51, when he represented her as a protection legal professional in 2015 into 2016, in response to her testimony. Zerola, who has two previous acquittals for related expenses, had served as a prosecutor in district attorneys’ workplaces in each Essex and Suffolk earlier than turning into a felony protection lawyer.
She mentioned their relationship moved from attorney-client into friendship after which that the pair “became more” when her case closed in early 2016.
But the main focus of this trial is what occurred on the night time of Nov. 9, 2016, and the subsequent morning, at round 7 a.m., when prosecutors say the alleged sufferer awoke to Zerola molesting her after which pulled down her black scrubs — which is the uniform the place she and Daley each labored as estheticians — and proceeded to rape her.
Daley and the alleged sufferer left work someday round 9 p.m. that night time and headed to a bar close to the place they labored. Daley testified they every had two martinis after which break up a bottle of wine as they watched SnapChat tales and realized that Zerola was already out and about and at a live performance. That’s when considered one of them — “probably me,” Daley testified — determined to contact him to see if he wished to fulfill up. He did.
Cue the Four Winds, the bar all of them met up at, as beforehand described by the alleged sufferer in her testimony and by their bartender for the night time, Jacqueline Hurley, who was the primary witness to take the stand Tuesday. They would additionally attempt to go to a strip membership, however that was closed so that they returned to the Four Winds.
“We were all drinking a lot; it’s hard to have, like, a clear memory of what specifically happened, we were all close to each other,” Daley mentioned, including that the defendant “just kept ordering” vodka sodas for the group. “There was a lot of kissing on the cheek.”
Or possibly that’s not fairly proper, protection legal professional Joseph Krowski Jr. mentioned in his thunderous rebuttal to this and lots of different factors.
Here, he mentioned, was amongst her first misstatements and {that a} video existed — it was entered into proof Tuesday and performed once more Wednesday for her reminiscence’s profit — exhibiting the alleged sufferer herself not simply receiving kisses from her accused rapist that night time, however planting them on him, too, together with on his lips.
Krowski hammered Daley in regards to the 4 totally different events she spoke on this matter — an preliminary interview with police detectives on Nov. 19, 2016, her testimony to a grand jury 77 days later, a pre-trial interview with prosecutors and police detectives on May 15 of this yr and, lastly, her testimony that day. He began his cross-examination by depicting her reminiscence of the time as each “very bad” and “very selective.”
“You seem to have a tendency to remember specific things that in your mind put Mr. Zerola in a negative light,” Krowski mentioned, later asking “No disrespect, but do you have any cognitive difficulties?”
He continued the questioning of her credibility and, across the time she answered that she couldn’t bear in mind what she had mentioned as a result of taking the stand was “a very stressful thing,” she started wiping tears from her eyes.
The inconsistencies Krowski introduced up included who precisely went to sleep on the sofa within the Back Bay house, to what precisely the alleged sufferer mentioned when she woke Daley up, to why Daley wouldn’t ask any follow-up questions when her finest pal indicated that Zerola might have executed one thing inappropriate, to why she instantly remembered Zerola was shopping for tons of drinks on the bar when she instructed the grand jury that she couldn’t bear in mind something about that night time.
Daley had mentioned she was feeling too sick to ask follow-up questions, however Krowski requested why she was too sick to be interested in that however not too sick to spend the day with Zerola the morning of the alleged rape, together with having intercourse with him in his grey Jeep outdoors a north-of-Boston courthouse earlier than he needed to seem for a listening to.
Wednesday additionally noticed testimony from Sharon Italiane, the registered nurse who carried out the rape equipment on the alleged sufferer and testified to bruising and minor abrasions on the alleged sufferer’s vagina, and Boston Police Department Det. Michael Ross who was one of many detectives who first interviewed Daley throughout their investigation.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”