The nurse who made the first, unsuccessful effort to alert the authorities to the torture of a Haitian immigrant in a Brooklyn precinct said Sunday night that she was breaking through an attempt by other hospital workers to cover up the incident.
The nurse, Magalie Laurent, said that she was told of the alleged brutalization of Abner Louima by another nurse at Coney Island Hospital who had treated him in the operating room and who urged her to notify the family, the police and the news media.Laurent said the other nurse told her: "You must not keep it a secret. We must let everybody know."
Hospital officials had no comment Sunday.
An unusual, complete silence surrounded Louima's case, Laurent said, when she arrived for work about 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 9, about 10 hours after Louima says he was sexually assaulted with a bathroom plunger in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct.
Then, around 7:30 that evening, the other nurse, troubled and shaking, approached her saying, "I know you are Haitian. You should know what happened."
Investigators have said that Louima was frightened in the ambulance and when he arrived at the hospital accompanied by two police officers from the 70th Precinct. It was only when he was alone in the emergency room, without the police present, that he confided in a nurse, investigators have said.
After the other nurse told her what had happened, Laurent said, she called Louima's family, the police Internal Affairs Bureau and New York 1, the local all-news cable channel.
Describing the reaction of the officer at Internal Affairs who answered the call, Laurent said, "It seemed like he didn't care.
"I knew that they hadn't taken my call seriously," she said. "And it was proved to me. They could have gone to that precinct and secured the crime scene."
The police conceded on Friday that a call to the Internal Affairs Bureau was bungled on the night after the beating. It was not until 3:55 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 10, about 36 hours after Louima says he was tortured in the station house bathroom, that the action desk, which receives Internal Affairs calls, logged in a complaint from the victim's family and began an investigation.
Moving swiftly after the call on Sunday afternoon, the police and the Brooklyn district attorney's office charged four police officers with beating Louima on the way to the station after he was arrested in a street scuffle outside a Flatbush nightclub. Two of the officers have been charged with shoving the wooden handle of a plunger into Louima's rectum in the station house bathroom, seriously injuring him.
But a lawyer for the Louima family, Brian Figueroux, contended that "critical evidence was compromised by the delay." It was only on Wednesday, more than four days after the attack, that detectives were seen dredging the sewers outside the station house looking for the plunger.
The case is likely to shift to federal jurisdiction soon, partly because federal civil rights statutes would allow a wider range of prosecution, the admissibility of more evidence and greater punishment.