Youth Testifies He Did Not Attack Jogger : Trial: Defendant Yusef Salaam tells court he was in Central Park but never saw the victim. His statement contradicts report by detective.

NEW YORK —  In a dramatic gamble, defendant Yusef Salaam took the witness stand on his own behalf Wednesday to deny that he participated in the gang rape and assault that almost killed an investment banker while she was jogging last year in New York’s Central Park.

The brutality of the attack on the 29-year-old jogger, who was left to die in a puddle of mud and her own blood, horrified New Yorkers and became a national symbol of urban fear and violence.

Salaam, 16, who testified despite the vigorous objections of lawyers for two other defendants, said he entered the park the night the crime was committed with a group of 50 youths, but soon split from the group. He said he carried a 12-inch-long metal pipe that was given to him by a friend for safekeeping and that he saw several youths beating someone near the jogging track.

Salaam said he also stumbled on a bum he thought was dead, but ran away without notifying the police.

“If I had touched that person, my fingerprints would have been on him,” the tall forcefully spoken teen-ager said in response to a staccato, skeptical cross examination by Assistant Dist. Atty. Elizabeth Lederer.

“Did you call for help?” the prosecutor asked.

“No,” Salaam said.

“You stayed in the park?”

“Yes, I did,” the witness replied.

“Isn’t it true that the reason you’re testifying today is because you don’t want to take responsibility for a woman you damn near killed,” the prosecutor asked, glaring at the defendant who glared back.

“I didn’t try to kill anybody,” Salaam said.

Salaam said that soon after entering the park he left his 50 companions as they were climbing a hill because, “I got tired.”

He said he never saw, touched or attacked the jogger the night of April 19, 1989.

“I don’t remember a female jogger being assaulted,” he testified. “That would have stood out most in my mind.”

The defendant was asked why he entered the park at night.

“I thought it would be fun,” he replied.

His statements directly contradicted previous testimony by Detective Thomas McKenna that Salaam had confessed to hitting the woman jogger twice with the pipe and had fondled her breasts. Unlike two other defendants, Antron McCray, 16, and Raymond Santana, 15, Salaam did not sign a statement or make a videotaped confession. All three defendants are charged with 13 criminal counts, including attempted murder, rape and sodomy.

Detectives stopped questioning Salaam when they learned he was only 15 years old, not a year older as his bus pass indicated. Under New York state law, a witness under 15 can not be questioned without a parent or guardian present.

Salaam said he first met the other defendants when they were together in a holding pen in a local police precinct after being arrested after the attack.

Salaam told the jury Wednesday he carried the bus pass with a false age to attract girls.

“Since I’m tall, I would tell the girls I was older than the age I was,” he said.

His testimony was a high risk strategy by his lawyer, Robert Burns. When Burns decided Tuesday to put his client on the stand, his fellow defense lawyers pleaded angrily with him in the hallway outside the seventh floor courtroom not to do so.

In the courtroom, Burns asked: “Did you see a female jogger?”

“No, I never saw a female jogging,” Salaam answered.

“Did you tell Detective McKenna you saw a female jogger in the park?”

“No,” the defendant said.

These answers were received skeptically by Lederer who sought to hammer home to the jury several points: That detectives initially believed Salaam was 16 because of the altered bus pass, that he carried the pipe into the park as a weapon, and that he realized the gravity of what had happened in the park while he was being questioned.