From [HERE] The criminal case against a former Morgan Stanley MS +2.54% executive charged with stabbing a cab driver following a fare dispute was dropped Monday after a Connecticut state’s attorney revealed that the driver waited to turn the knife over to police. The driver, Mohamed Ammar, “had the knife the whole time,” said supervisory assistant state’s attorney Steven Weiss. “He had ample opportunity to tell police and he didn’t do that.”
The defendant, William Bryan Jennings (in photo), a white man, was charged with assault and hate crimes for attacking Ammar last December after the driver took Jennings from Manhattan to Jennings’ home in Darien, Conn. Ammar claimed Jennings refused to pay the fare and that he drove off with Jennings still in his cab to look for police.
In an ensuing scuffle, Ammar was stabbed in the hand with a pen knife. Ammar, who is from Egypt, also reported that Jennings told him to “go back” to his country. Jennings was at the time Morgan Stanley’s co-head of U.S. bond underwriting. He is no longer at the company. Weiss emphasized that Jennings didn’t immediately call police and described him as uncooperative. But he said Ammar couldn’t adequately explain why he didn’t immediately give the knife to investigators, even after an interview and a search of his cab.
“I simply can’t go forward when I have a witness who didn’t cooperate with police,” Weiss said of Ammar.
Jennings attended the brief hearing and thanked his family and attorney.
“Obviously it feels good,” he said outside court. “It was a difficult ordeal for my family.”
Jennings and his attorney, Eugene Ricchio, declined to discuss the reasons for the dismissal or Jennings’ current employment.
“The lesson should be, when someone of prominence is arrested, that the public and the press jump to conclusions about the situation,” Ricchio said.
Speaking Monday in front of a mosque in Astoria, Queens, Ammar said the dismissal was “very unfair.”
“When I hear … this guy is going to run away with it, after all what happened to me, I’m very sad,” he said.
Ammar and his attorney, Hassan Ahmad, said he found the knife under the rear of the cab’s front passenger side seat, directly in front of where Jennings sat, “several weeks” after the incident. Officials said the cab was searched within days but no knife was found.
Ammar then waited several more weeks before telling prosecutors about the discovery in May. Ahmad said his client had been scared about his fingerprints on the blade and admitted he made a “big mistake” by not turning the knife over immediately.
But Ahmad said the assistant state’s attorney spoke confidently about the case until abruptly announcing in late September that he wouldn’t take it forward.
“At no time did he say the knife was a major problem and then all of a sudden it’s the whole case,” he said. Ahmad said he will ask the U.S. Attorney’s Office to consider bringing federal hate crime charges and that his client is still considering civil action against Jennings.