Lawyers for the bar bouncer accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering Imette St. Guillen hope to get him off the hook by shifting the focus to his former boss — a tavern owner initially eyed by police.
“I’m going on the offensive,” said lawyer Joyce David, a lawyer for the defendant Darryl Littlejohn, 44. “I’m putting the investigation on trial to show that it was biased.”
While Littlejohn will be the Brooklyn DA’s target during the trial, slated to begin with jury selection this week, his lawyers will target Dan Dorrian, the owner of the bar The Falls, where Littlejohn worked and St. Guillen was last seen.
David will come to court armed with several documents culled from the massive police investigation into St. Guillen’s February 2006 disappearance that bolster her contention that cops should have looked harder at Dorrian.
According to a Feb. 28 detective’s memo — written just two days after St. Guillen’s disappearance — Dorrian tried to explain away signs that he’d been in a fight.
Then, during a sit-down Dorrian had with cops at Police Headquarters, he was “inconsistent with statements and answers,” according to a second memo.
Littlejohn’s lawyers also hope to bolster his defense with a memo of a police interview with another bouncer at The Falls, identified in papers only as “Quan.”
Quan told cops “how the Dorrians would get into fights with patrons and after hours would have sex in their bathroom facilities.”
Dorrian’s lawyer did not return calls seeking comment on the upcoming trial, and attempts to reach Dorrian at his Upper East Side apartment were unsuccessful.
There’s no guarantee Littlejohn’s legal team will succeed in slinging the mud at Dorrian. Procedural rules often prevent statements recorded in documents from coming into evidence unless the speaker is called as a witness.
And even with all the mud, Littlejohn’s team will still have to contend with DNA evidence linking him to the dead woman’s body, which was found in a weed-choked lot in Brooklyn several days after her disappearance.
Littlejohn is already serving 25 years to life for the kidnapping and assault of a York College student in Queens in 2005.