Photo of suspect, courtesy NYPD

Several nearby construction workers heard the woman scream and rushed to help; the attacker fled. The victim was taken to an area hospital where she is in stable condition.

The suspect is described as being in his mid-20s and was last seen wearing a red Adidas jacket over a black hooded sweatshirt.

Anyone with information regarding this crime is urged to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-8477(TIPS). All callers to Crime Stoppers remain anonymous and all calls will be kept confidential. You may also submit tips to the Crime Stoppers website by visiting:
www.nypdcrimestoppers.com or text your tips to 274637 (crimes) and enter TIP577.

Photo by WhiskeyGoneBad

By Paul Bisceglio

Police have arrested the unidentified mohawk-wearing Hispanic man who allegedly sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at the Fort Hamilton N subway station in Sunset Park last month, ABC News reports.

The perpetrator approached the girl from behind in the station at around 5 p.m. on May 31, said police. He grabbed her under her skirt then fled the scene.

The man was arrested after NYPD released surveillance photos of the man yesterday to aid his capture.

According to ABC, detectives will put the man in lineups on Thursday afternoon. No charges were immediately filed.

Jackson, who lives and works on the Upper West Side, met Linda Fairstein, then the head of the unit, in the mid 1990s and began following her cases.

“It just became an obsession of mine to try to do a film about the unit,” Jackson says. “The fact that it was the first unit in the country; it really is the gold standard. I thought, rape is so chronically underreported that if you showed a portrait of the prosecutors who do take on these crimes that maybe survivors would be more likely to come forward.”

The film highlights the day-to-day work of the prosecutors and follows two cases in particular—a 16-year-old cold case and another recent rape—both brutal crimes. Jackson interviewed the victim of the older case, Natasha Alexenko, and told the story of how her rapist was finally found using DNA evidence.

“I had pretty much closed that chapter in my life,” Alexenko explains in a recent interview. “I had healed and moved on. It was certainly a shock” when they found the perpetrator. She decided to come forward for the film because she wanted to help the prosecutors who had guided her so compassionately through the difficult process of the trial. “I had actually really been inspired by the men and woman that work in the sex crimes unit,” Alexenko says. “I told them I would do anything I could do to help them.”

Jackson spent about a year getting to know Alexenko before she even filmed the interviews with her. She also followed four or five cases simultaneously but could only use footage from trials that had ended by the time the film aired. She shot many scenes from the trial of Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, the NYPD officers recently acquitted of rape, but wasn’t able to include it.

“I don’t know if it would have changed the film” to include that case, Jackson says. “It would have shown how incredibly difficult their job is, often—in a case like that where there was no hard evidence, there were no eyewitnesses.”

The film also illustrates how cases like that would never have made it to trial before New York State reformed its laws in the 1970s. Jackson interviewed former District Attorney Robert Morganthau about his role in changing the way rape was prosecuted. “I went to him and said, everybody’s talking about your legacy— white collar crime, all this stuff—but nobody’s really talking about the jewel in your crown: his incredible mentoring of women and his championing this unit,” Jackson says. “He’s justifiably proud of that unit.”

Jackson also deliberately included snippets of the prosecutors debating the merits of Derek Jeter and swapping stories about their personal lives.

“A film about sexual violence isn’t depressing. It’s full of humor, it’s full of real humanity,” Jackson says. “They may be really driving, obsessed, laser-focused lawyers, but at the same time, they have obsessions with movie stars, they’re huge Yankees fans, they sweat college loans, they worry about their weight.”

They also work extremely hard at a decidedly unglamorous job. Based on popular TV legal dramas, “we have this perception that they’re all sitting in mahogany-lined offices wearing Prada,” Alexenko says. “And that’s very very far from the truth.”

Both Jackson and Alexenko hope that the film will help victims of sexual assault understand what happens when they come forward to report the crimes against them. Alexenko quit her job last year to work fulltime on her foundation, Natasha’s Justice Project, which works closely with the Joyful Heart Foundation, founded by Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay, to end the national backlog of untested rape kits.

“With my case, the closure I had, I just felt it’s my karmic duty to take the tools, to take my story and help others,” Alexenko says. “There are 180,000 untested rape kits sitting on shelves. We have the means to find these criminals through databases.”

Jackson hopes that viewers will come away with an understanding of how far the legal system has progressed toward helping sexual assault victims, and how hard the sex crimes unit works for justice.

“It’s either happened to one of us, or we know someone it’s happened to,” Jackson says, citing the statistic that one in six women will be the victim of a sexual assault. “I hope that the film brings a new way of looking at the crime itself, and hopefully motivates more women to come forward, more attorneys to dedicate themselves to this kind of law, and really makes the point of the importance of units like this.”

Police released surveillance video of a man they believe tried to sexually assault a woman on the Upper West Side Sunday, Aug. 29.

At approximately 3:40 a.m., police believe the man, in his mid-twenties, followed the victim into a building on Amsterdam Avenue within the 24th Precinct, which stretches from West 86th to West 110th streets. Inside the building, the man supposedly threw the woman to the ground and attempted to sexually assault her. He fled south on Amsterdam Avenue.

Anyone with information about the incident can call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS, submit tips online at www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, or text tips to 274637 then enter TIP577.