SDNY COURTHOUSE, Feb 20 -- A four-year employee of the Yonkers Parks Department had been detained on charges of armed kidnapping - but Inner City Press has learned more than was included in the indictment and press release by the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office.
Owen Drain's alleged victim was a male, long-time commercial sex partner who escaped running from Drain's black Cadillac Escalade after having his iPhone and iCloud wiped of images of their sexual relationship, Assistant US Attorney Ni Qian said in a bail proceeding only covered by Inner City Press.
SDNY Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses asked AUSA Qian if the Yonkers cell phone store employee who came out to the Cadillac where the victim was held and took his passwords was not, in fact, an accomplice. Qian said that is being investigated.
Federal Defender Jonathan Marviny argued that Drain in his 35 years of live has had no convictions, and is now living with his wife and his father in Tuckahoe, New York. (The street address was said in open court but Inner City Press is voluntarily not publishing it in this format.) More on Patreon here.
Drain was arrested in Harrison, New York on February 17 in the black Escalade, without a license plate on it but with two inside, along with a bottle of testosterone, an expandable baton illegal in New York, a gun and portable digital scale.
While Drain was released on bail for that, the detective who accompanied him into the SDNY Magistrates Court got into an audible disagreement with U.S. Marshals, referring loudly to HIV and saying "What do you want me to do, a blood test?"
After Judge Moses ordered Drain detained, she said that the FBI should take him to the hospital first. The proceeding went past 9 pm; Inner City Press had been in the Mag Court since 4 pm, asking for the docket numbers of cases presented and often being denied. There is sometimes a lack of transparency, including as to what is said in the robing room or behind locked Magistrate doors upstairs and why that is out of the public eye. But this is the story of Owen Drain, and it is an Inner City Press exclusive. The case is US v. Drain, 20-cr-145 (Moses).
