Connect with us

New York

Queens Doctor Charged With Drugging and Assaulting Patients on Camera

Published

on

Queens Doctor Charged With Drugging and Assaulting Patients on Camera

The grim accusation rocked a major New York City hospital late last year: An emerging gastroenterologist had been charged with first-degree rape. Prosecutors said he had drugged a girlfriend and filmed the assault at his apartment.

The doctor, Zhi Alan Cheng, 33, was fired from the medical center, NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, in December after his arrest.

Then, when investigators searched his electronic devices, they uncovered a disturbing stash: dozens of short videos showing Mr. Cheng sexually abusing other women at his home in Astoria and at the hospital where he worked, prosecutors said.

On Monday, Mr. Cheng was charged with 50 new counts, including rape, sexual abuse, assault, misdemeanor drug possession and unlawful surveillance, in criminal court in Queens. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment.

The new charges are based on the former physician’s encounters with six women, including patients and dating partners.

Advertisement

Prosecutors said the assaults were part of a brutal, methodical pattern in which Mr. Cheng drugged women with liquid anesthesia before attacking them. Many later woke with no memory of what had happened.

Investigators said there were additional victims whom they had yet to identify, including one woman whose sexual assault Mr. Cheng recorded at the hospital.

At least five other unidentified women were assaulted at hotel rooms or at homes in New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Thailand over the past several years, according to the videos’ data, the prosecutors said.

In a statement, Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, urged anyone with potential leads about other victims to come forward. Ms. Katz said the evidence revealed “a sexual predator of the absolute worst kind, a serial rapist” who was willing to violate “every standard of human decency.”

Mr. Cheng made his plea through his lawyer, Jeffrey Einhorn, who declined to say more. “It’s too early,” he said outside the court.

Advertisement

Mr. Cheng was returned to a jail on Rikers Island, where he has been held since the initial charges.

The new charges follow several recent cases in New York of powerful medical professionals exploiting their access to patients to sexually abuse them.

They include Robert A. Hadden, a former gynecologist at prominent hospitals who was sentenced last month to 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting patients, and Ricardo Cruciani, who was convicted of similar sex crimes last year.

Unlike those doctors, Mr. Cheng — who attended Albany Medical College in the 2010s before completing his residency at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco — had only recently received his New York medical license, in June 2020, online records show.

The assault of his first known victim at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, in Flushing, came less than a year later, according to court documents.

Advertisement

Angela Karafazli, a spokeswoman for the hospital system, said in a statement that “we are appalled and deeply saddened by what these victims and their families have endured.”

The victims who have been identified ranged from 19 to 47 years old, the authorities said, and Mr. Cheng often took multiple recordings of each assault.

Mr. Cheng was arrested in December 2022 after the authorities said his girlfriend at the time discovered videos of him assaulting her. The police later found drugs — including fentanyl, ketamine, LSD and several anesthetics typically used in surgeries — and devices with dozens of other recordings at his home.

In one case, Mr. Cheng is accused of filming himself groping a 37-year-old patient as she lay unconscious at the Queens hospital in 2021.

A short time later, prosecutors said, he raped a woman whom he met on a dating app. In videos of her assault, a small brown bottle was visible on his bed, according to the authorities, who said they had recovered a similar bottle from his apartment that contained a powerful anesthetic.

Advertisement

And in a third episode that summer, a 19-year-old woman had sought treatment at the hospital for severe pain from gallstones. Mr. Cheng performed an unnecessary rectal exam, and later injected the woman’s IV line with an “unknown substance” and sexually assaulted her, her lawyers and prosecutors said.

The woman filed a lawsuit against the hospital in June under a pseudonym, accusing the center of conspiring “to cover up her assault” and failing to intervene after she told staff Mr. Cheng had administered a painful injection that made her lose consciousness.

The NewYork-Presbyterian system fell under scrutiny recently related to Mr. Hadden’s case, agreeing, along with another hospital, to $236 million in settlements with more than 220 patients. It also employed a former urologist, Darius Paduch, who was charged in April with sexually abusing a Manhattan patient when the patient was a minor.

Ms. Karafazli said the system had been reviewing its “numerous stringent patient safety policies and protocols” for potential areas of improvement. She added that the hospital had provided “additional training for all employees” after Mr. Cheng was arrested.

Adam Slater, a lawyer who filed the 19-year-old’s suit with another firm, Liakas Law, said the hospitals had shown a repeated “failure to protect patients.”

Advertisement

“It’s not an isolated incident,” Mr. Slater said. “It’s systemic.”

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

on

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Advertisement

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

Advertisement

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

Advertisement

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Advertisement
Queens-Midtown Tunnel 50,600
Lincoln Tunnel 49,200
Williamsburg Bridge 27,900
Manhattan Bridge 24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel 23,100
Queensboro Bridge 21,700
Brooklyn Bridge 17,100
Holland Tunnel 15,400
All other entrances 118,000
Total 347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

Advertisement

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

on

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

Continue Reading

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

on

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

Continue Reading

Trending