Date From Hell:  NYPD Traffic Cop Drugged, Raped Teen, Say Detectives
The expression "date from hell" is arguably overused, but in the case of a date between an NYPD traffic cop and a 17 year-old girl, the phrase seems very fitting, if charges from sex crimes investigators prove to be true.

Detectives say that Traffic Enforcement Officer Charles Taylor, 25, drugged the girl and raped her in a case that spans 15 miles and two boroughs.

This story began in Downtown Brooklyn where, police sources say, at the corner of Dekalb and Flatbush Avenues, Taylor met the girl on Sunday afternoon for a first date. The two had been texting and talking on the phone for days, after having met the week before.

According to investigators, during the date, Taylor slipped a date tranquilizing drug into her drink. "You're almost to a state of unconciousness," retired NYPD detective Wally Zeins said about the date rape drug allegedly used. "You're almost in a state of passing out."

Detectives agree with Zeins, who has investigated countless sex crime cases, that the drug's effect was so strong that the off duty traffic officer was able to drive the passed out girl from Downtown Brooklyn to his apartment in the Bronx, at the Bronx River Houses, in the Park Versailles section of the borough.

Taylor lives on the seventh floor of his public housing building. There, according to investigators, the crime with which he's charged took place. "He took her into his apartment and forcibly raped her," Zeins told PIX11 News.

The teenage girl was eventually able to get home, where she told a relative that she'd had sex with Taylor that was non-consensual. That led to detectives opening the case against him, and to his arrest on a rape charge by the NYPD special victims squad late Tuesday night. Taylor is also suspended without pay from the traffic enforcement unit indefinitely.

People who know him, however, express doubt of his guilt. "I know he's a hard worker... I don't believe the accusations," said Taylor's next door neighbor, Michael Darius. "He's a great guy."

Another neighbor, Eddie Felder, who is also the president of the tenants' association in Taylor's building, told PIX11 News, "Whoever is saying [these charges] needs to check their self, 'cause that guy don't mess with nobody."

However, as the retired detective points out, there's apparently extensive surveillance camera video, and other evidence to show what actually happened. "A rape kit," Zeins said, "...with a medical doctor, then the kit is taken to the medical examiner's office, where it's processed."

Taylor is in custody waiting to go before a judge. His first appearance follows the convictions this year of two higher profile cases of sex crimes carried out by NYPD employees. Officer Michael Pena is serving a 75-year sentence for sexually assaulting a woman on her way to her first day of work teaching kindergarten, and Officer Kenneth Moreno is serving a year behind bars for official misconduct after a jury failed to convict him on a more serious charge after he had sex with an incapacitated woman while Moreno was on duty.