Male stripper describes alleged attack by off-duty officers

A Milwaukee man recalled for jurors Wednesday the "torture" he suffered at the hands of several off-duty police officers who allegedly beat him bloody because they believed he had stolen a police officer's badge.

"I thought I was going to die," Frank Jude Jr. testified in the battery trial of three former Milwaukee police officers. "All I was thinking about was my little daughter, who was just born."

With a scar on his nose still visible from the surgery he underwent as a result of the incident, Jude described the brief yet violent encounter on Oct. 24, 2004, outside a party attended by several off-duty police officers.

But as the first witness to testify against former officers Andrew Spengler, Daniel Masarik, and Jon Bartlett, Jude revealed a fundamental flaw in the state's case concerning the lack of reliable eyewitness identification.

Jude, a former male stripper for a company called Grin and Bare It, testified that he attended the party at the home of defendant Spengler as a guest of three girls whom he met earlier that evening at a bachelorette party.

The alleged victim, who says he is half African-American and half Caucasian, told jurors he immediately got a "bad vibe" from the mostly white party, and within five minutes decided to leave.

But just as the group got into a vehicle belonging to one of the women he had arrived with, Jude testified that a group of men and one woman from the party swarmed the truck, kicked out one of the headlights, and demanded to know what had happened to Spengler's badge and wallet.

The confrontation quickly escalated, Jude testified, after he was pulled from the car and someone asked him, "Where's the f---ing badge, nigger?"

Despite his insistence that he did not have the badge, the men persisted in taunting him, and eventually took him down to the ground, he said.

"The hits were coming from all different directions to my head, to my body, just all over," the hulking 27-year-old witness testified. "I can't really explain it, it was torture."

Jude told jurors he was threatened with a knife, a gun and had a sharp object shoved into his ears that caused him to bleed for several days.

Milwaukee District Attorney Michael McCann asked Jude to identify the leather jacket that Jude was wearing that evening, which the state alleges Bartlett sliced in half using a knife to get handcuffs around his wrists.

For his alleged use of the knife, Bartlett faces an extra nine years in prison on top of charges of substantial battery and reckless endangerment.

But Jude admitted that apart from Spengler, whom he met earlier in the evening, he could not identify any of his attackers.

Lawyers for the defendants condemned the "brutal," "despicable" and "abhorrent" beating that landed Jude in a hospital for several days after the incident and left him unable to wear his wedding ring because of permanent swelling in his finger.

But as the attorneys delivered their opening statements, each insisted that their clients were not responsible.

"This case, unfortunately, is not just about whether Frank Jude was beaten without cause, this case is a complicated whodunit," Spengler's lawyer, Michael Hart, said in his opening. "The question for you today is who is responsible for Mr. Jude's injuries, and who is not."

Hart insisted that his client employed proper police procedure in attempting to take into custody a physically imposing man whom he suspected of stealing his badge and wallet.

"It was Mr. Jude, through his actions and his words, who initiated the need for any physical contact," Hart told the panel of 10 women and five men.

Bartlett's lawyer took a similar approach and asked jurors to consider the interests of the other off-duty police officers who would be testifying against the defendants.

Of the 13 officers who were at the scene, 10 others were either suspended or disciplined following an internal inquiry into the incident. Only Masarik, Bartlett and Spengler are facing criminal charges.

Steven Kohn, the lawyer representing 26-year-old Daniel Masarik, told jurors that cell phone records will show that his client was talking to his wife from 2:38 to 2:49 a.m. on Oct. 24, 2004.

He also promised the panelists that his client will take the stand and tell them he had absolutely no physical contact with the victim.

"Dan isn't down there, Dan didn't do it, and the phone records will tell you that," Kohn said.

But McCann urged the panel to look past the theft allegations and focus on the severity of Jude's injuries in considering whether the defendants used reasonable and appropriate force.

"This isn't a theft case, the issue is the violence that ensued subsequent to the allegations," the prosecutor said. "Did these off-duty officers become unreasonable?"

McCann told the panel that Jude was kicked so hard in the groin that he needed to use a catheter for several days.

Testimony resumes Thursday. The trial is being streamed live on the Web at Court TV Extra.

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He's lucky. If he'd been holding takeout fajitas they would have really tuned him up.

San Diego PD in the '70's vs the Military make this guy look like a real whiner.

My how things have changed.

TT

5 posted on 03/29/2006 10:19:05 PM PST by fieldmarshaldj (Cheney X -- Destroying the Liberal Democrat Traitors By Any Means Necessary -- Ya Dig ? Sho 'Nuff.)

Toss the lot of them into the can for a very long time.

The ones who didn't administer the tune up know who did. Failing to come forward is a violation of their oath and the law.

If I were the prosecutor I'd hit them with a Conspiracy to Obstruct charge just for sh*** and grins.

Add in deprivation of civil rights under false color of authority and I'd see 'em in the stir for the next 20.

I really, really hate bad cops.

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