Good Crabbing Award: Bartenders Who Stopped A Rape Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 2007 (HAT TIP to Echidne):

It looked for all the world as if the couple on a date -- he was darkly handsome and a little older than the pretty, petite blonde with the Russian accent -- were having a great time together.

"A really great time," their waitress, Karri Cormican, recalled thinking. "She was facing him, had one of her legs up on the bench seat." Good body language.

So it came as a shock when after the woman left the window-side table to visit the restroom, Cormican saw the man shake a white powder into the Hefeweizen beer he had ordered for his date.

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Because of educational efforts, "people are aware that these drugs are used in bars by perpetrators of all ages," she said. "So these two women who saw it knew what was happening." On the night in question, Cormican, 23, quickly approached the bartender, Hannah Bridgeman-Oxley, 27, and told her what she had seen. The two women hatched a plan.

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Not the kind of place where what looked like an attempted date rape would occur. Or where a guy on a first date, like Joseph Szlamnik, at the time a 43- year-old senior management assistant for the San Francisco Unified School District, would commit a crime.

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Their chance came when Tatiana went outside to smoke a cigarette. Cormican grabbed the beer with the white powder and followed her. It was a mild night in May 2005 -- the wheels of justice in this case, as one courtroom observer said, have ground exceedingly slowly.

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The bartender rushed outside to tell the two women that while they had been talking, Szlamnik had dropped two pills into the new beer Tatiana had left behind on the table.

"He did it again," she said.

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Last Tuesday, Judge Bouliane sentenced Szlamnik, who had no prior criminal history, to one year in jail but suspended six months of that. Szlamnik entered jail voluntarily in January after agreeing to plead guilty to transporting and furnishing a narcotic rather than to a crime directly related to a planned sexual assault. He is due to be released in May.

Here is a link to contact information on Noe's Bar in San Francisco.