‘Wrong Man’ (not the movie) plays in Queens

by Jim Callaghan

May 11, 2006 3:21 PM

Teacher returns to school after arrest charges prove false

Cardozo HS English teacher Ara Muradyan was greeted with cheers from his colleagues and students when he went back to work on April 27 after a trip through the horrors and injustices of the New York City legal system.

He had been arrested in November and accused of public lewdness by two students at the school who lied about the alleged crime. It took four months for the Queens District Attorney’s office to drop the charges when it became clear that the case against him was based on a false accusation and sloppy police work. Only when the actual perpetrator was caught did Muradyan’s ordeal end.

Muradyan said he was “elated” at the show of support at his school. Teachers wore green ribbons, which they described as the symbol of rebirth and innocence. His time away from the school just added to his nightmare.

“I had a horrible experience in the rubber room,” Muradyan said. “I felt totally useless, doing crosswords and watching TV.”

Not showing during that time was Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “The Wrong Man,” starring Henry Fonda, in which a Queens musician is falsely accused of a crime.

The basis for Muradyan’s arrest was an incident that occurred last Oct. 20. A man driving a BMW was sitting in traffic next to an MTA bus. The two students said they looked out the window and saw the man fondling himself and staring at them.

The students did not call the police, nor did they report the incident to anyone at the school. Three weeks later, they claimed the man in the car was Muradyan and said they recognized him in the school.

When detectives arrived at his house, the teacher claimed he was home on Oct. 20 with his mother and a neighbor. He told them he did not own a BMW, nor did he have access to one. The only car in the family is a Jeep registered in his mother’s name. He also said he walked to and from school every day, and all his colleagues at the school knew that.

He offered his computer hard drive to prove he was on the Internet at the time of the alleged crime.

Muradyan said cops weren’t interested in checking out his story. Instead, Muradyan was dragged to the stationhouse, where the two girls picked him out of a lineup. He spent the night in a holding pen with 40 men accused of everything from misdemeanors to felonies.

“I was kind of scared in there,” he recalled. “I didn’t sleep all night. There were some pretty tough-looking guys in there.”

Until fate intervened, Muradyan was on his way to a 90-day jail sentence and — worse — the 27-year-old teacher was faced with the loss of his teaching license.

“That was the most upsetting part,” he said. “I became a teacher so I could make a difference in the world, to make it a better place, and now I was locked up for something I didn’t do.”

In his darkest moments of despair, he thought of quitting the profession. He is still angry that it took so long to clear his name and at the carelessness of the detectives.

Not until Jan. 19, when a lawyer driving a BMW was arrested for fondling himself in his car in front of other female Cardozo students, was there any glimmer of hope for Muradyan. However, the two girls who accused Muradyan refused to change their original identification of him.

But they made a big mistake in their trumped-up charge: they changed the time of the original incident from 4:15 to 1:15. Muradyan was in the school at the time, teaching a class, a fact attested to by two colleagues and the principal. With the case quickly falling apart because of the lies, the Queens district attorney cleared Muradyan.

Although he is thrilled to be back in the classroom, Muradyan said he is sad about what he describes as “an epidemic, where kids can say anything they want, without repercussions.”

His thoughts were shared by UFT President Randi Weingarten, who said, “We are seeing more and more of this. Too often, there is presumption of guilt. We have lots of cases like this, where people are sent to the rubber rooms for months.”

There has to be a real investigation of each case, she added. “And now we have a new contractual right that when there is a false accusation the Department of Education has to make the teacher whole,” she said. “Otherwise, the injury to a person’s reputation is permanent.”

To this day, Muradyan still doesn’t know who his accusers are, and nothing has happened to them. Perhaps a class in due process for his accusers might be in order, since they attend a school named after a New York judge appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the U.S. Supreme Court and who was described by Harvard professor Roscoe Pound as one of the 10 best legal minds in American history.

Muradyan also had help from his UFT chapter leader, Dino Sferrazza, and teachers at the school.

After Muradyan’s arrest, Sferrazza said he noticed a pattern from reading the DOE occurrence reports for Cardozo. “There were three or four similar incidents reported at Cardozo and we knew it was happening at other schools,” Sferrazza said. “I called Ara’s lawyer and urged him to subpoena the reports, which I felt proved it wasn’t him.”

Sferrazza said he was in constant touch with Muradyan during his time in the rubber room. “I was calling him to cheer him up and to tell him we were behind him.” Other teachers wrote letters of support to the Queens district attorney.

Muradyan said the first person he called from jail was his mother.

“That was the lowest point,” he said. “She was crying and she said, ‘I didn’t raise a son who would do such a thing.’”

The false arrest “broke my parents’ hearts big time,” Muradyan added.