‘A recipe for disaster’

The evidentiary part of the sexual assault trial of three Toronto police officers is over, with only closing submissions and the judge’s decision to come.

The three — Leslie Nyznik, Sameer Kara and Joshua Cabero — are pleading not guilty to forcing sex upon a female parking enforcement colleague in a downtown hotel room on Jan. 17, 2015.

The three say the sex was consensual; the 36-year-old woman says it absolutely wasn’t, and that whether because of the drinks she had or because she was as she suspects drugged, she couldn’t move or even speak.

The final defence witness was Detective Barry Radford, a supervisor who attended “the rookie buy night” party and bar hop.

Radford made it as far as the Brass Rail strip club that night, the last stop before the hotel, and on the cab ride there, with Nyznik, another male officer and the woman in the back seat, laughing and engaging in what he considered was “sexual innuendo,” he was profoundly uneasy, with alarm bells ringing.

“Men and women and alcohol,” Radford said. “We all know what happens. I did not want to be a witness to anything and end up here,” he said, meaning a place like the very witness box he was in.

“I thought it was a recipe for disaster.”

Radford was in the front passenger seat and immediately began talking to the cab driver, he said, anything to avoid hearing more of the conversation behind him, and at the Brass Rail, he used the washroom, said good night to Nyznik, and promptly left the club.

Asked in cross-examination by prosecutor Ted Ofiara why he hadn’t sounded a note of caution to the junior officers, Radford said while he sensed the night could go pear-shaped, he didn’t know it would.

“I’m not psychic,” he said. “They’re all adults. You can’t tell adults what to do.”

Later Monday, defence lawyer Alan Gold, who represents Kara, made his closing argument, telling Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy that the most compelling evidence that the complainant had the capacity to consent are the closed-circuit videos from the various clubs and the hotel.

Though the investigation conducted by the Toronto police professional standards unit was sleepy at best — detectives didn’t seize all the available video until much of it had been lost — snippets played for the judge show the woman appearing to walk normally as she, Nyznik and Cabero got out of a taxi at the hotel.

Other clips showed the three of them walking to the hotel elevator, the woman seemingly chatting and laughing with the two men.

That video, Gold said, “shows no indications of incapacity whatsoever.”

He pointed out that whatever happened in the hotel room, it was “bracketed by two events of obvious consciousness” — the arrival of the three at the hotel and the woman’s departure from it about three hours later.

Both times, she appeared to be fully functioning and conscious, and yet of the former she had almost no memory and only little of the latter.

“The logical inference,” Gold said, “is what happened in the room she equally engaged in conscious acts she now doesn’t remember.”

As for the woman’s suspicion she was slipped a daterape drug — she suggested it may have happened at the Brass Rail, where she had her final drink, and hinted it might have been Nyznik who put something in her drink — the testimony of toxicologist Betty Chow sharply contradicts that, Gold said.

The woman testified she believed she was likely drugged at the strip club because once the taxi began moving, she had a sudden fierce headache, noticeable vision problems and difficulty following the conversation, and felt “really unwell.”

Chow testified that daterape drugs such as GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate) or ketamine or even alcohol alone may cause blackouts or unconsciousness, but that in such a state, a person can’t form memories.

Thus, she said, they can’t “retrieve” or recover them later.

And date-rape drugs are very fast-acting, usually within 15-30 minutes, Chow said, meaning that if the parking officer had been drugged at the Brass Rail, as she suspected, she would have had trouble exiting the taxi at the hotel and difficulty walking.

Gold called no witnesses, meaning Kara, who had left the party drunk and vomiting early that night (but awoke to also either have intercourse with or force intercourse upon the woman, as DNA tests showed), didn’t testify in his own defence.

Similarly, Cabero didn’t testify, nor did his lawyer, Pat Ducharme, call any evidence.

Only Nyznik took the stand, and only Harry Black, his lawyer, called any other witnesses — Radford.

Nyznik was adamant that the woman was a full and willing participant in the group sex with the three men that night.

But two Crown witnesses, both parking enforcement officers and friends of the complainant, said she told them — in one case the night after the incident and in the other, two days later — she had been sexually assaulted, but that she was terrified to report on three of her colleagues.

Ducharme, Black and prosecutors will all make their closing arguments Tuesday.

MEN AND WOMEN AND ALCOHOL. WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.