Insurance claim for totaled Mercedes entered as evidence in Bob Menendez corruption trial
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The insurance claim for Nadine Arslanian Menendez’s totaled car from December 2018 will be admissible in the federal corruption trial of New Jersey's Sen. Bob Menendez — but photos and information about how she damaged her car will not.
Arslanian Menendez hit and killed a pedestrian named Richard Koop. The strike damaged a Mercedes-Benz sedan she had been driving.
As Tuesday’s court session came to a close in lower Manhattan, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein discussed objections that had been filed for evidence still to come during the trial. Among the documents was the insurance claim filed by Arslanian that led her need a new car.
Arslanian Menendez’s attorney, Adam Fee, objected to “portions of a police report and associated photographs that reveal that the nature of that accident involved striking a pedestrian,” as Paul Monteleoni, a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, put it.
Monteleoni told the judge that they had redacted the police report.
“Doesn't show in any way that anyone was struck, that any other human being was involved besides the driver of the car,” Monteleoni said according to a transcript of Tuesday’s proceedings.
Photos of the damage to the car remained which Fee argued, doesn’t have “any relevance.”
“We're conceding the fact that the car was totaled, she needed a new car, the claim is made,” he said but didn’t want photos or Arslanian hitting a parked car included.
Stein opted to remove the photos because they “don't add very much and to the extent that anyone knows anything about this accident, I take it they can be looking at those photos from the standpoint of is this where a person was hit and killed.”
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Who is Nadine Arslanian Menendez?
Arslanian is a co-defendant in the case and is set to stand trial this summer. Her court date was postponed by a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment.
Her co-defendants include her husband, Menendez, and New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana and North Jersey developer Fred Daibes. A third, Jose Uribe, flipped his not guilty plea to guilty and agreed to cooperate.
The indictment includes allegations that Arslanian received a car paid for by co-defendants Hana and Uribe in 2019 after totaling her previous car during the crash that killed Koop.
In 2018, Arslanian was driving a Mercedes when she reportedly struck and killed Koop, 49, as she drove down a Bogota street. It took her five minutes to call police, according to police records.
Reports filed by the Bogota Police Department and the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office indicate that Arslanian's phone records were to be subpoenaed as part of the investigation into the crash.
Those subpoenas were never issued, nor were the phone records ever delivered to investigators, NorthJersey.com found after seeking public records pertaining to the crash.
Months later, it was Menendez who picked up the car from an impound lot. Uribe later made the payments to buy Arslanian Menendez a new car, according to the indictment.
Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@northjersey.com