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The woman said Thomas Cieslik “took the strap off the bag and held it in front of my face. He snapped …. I’ll never forget the sound.”
Then he shoved her into a corner and tightened the strap around her throat before she eventually fled to a nearby police station, she told Superior Court Judge Donald R. Venezia.
Defense attorney Joe Depa painted a different picture: He called the woman “a confrontational individual” and said the two had “the prototypical volatile relationship.”
“Typically after making love, she would start a fight,” the lawyer said. This time, “Cieslik had had enough. He was planning to leave.
“The bag was already packed,” Depa told the judge, “and, coincidentally, it belonged to a former boyfriend.”
Cieslik is charged with first-degree attempted murder and four other counts involving threats and bodily injury in the bench trial that began before Venezia today.
“He’s trying to kill me! He’s trying to kill me!” a North Arlington patrolman said the woman shouted as she pulled into the parking lot of police headquarters before dawn on May 20, 2012.
Patrolman Louis Pinto told Venezia he ran to the car, where he found the woman shoeless, in just a long t-shirt, “crying and shaking.”
He said he took her into headquarters, asked her what happened and took photographs of “many” bite marks and strap marks around her neck.
After the woman was treated at a nearby hospital, Pinto said, he went with her to her apartment and found “evidence that completely corroborated everything she told me.”
Depa, in turn, contended: “These were phantom bite marks. There was no breaking the skin. When she was triaged, there were no marks on her legs.”
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Jessica Gomperts told Venezia the violence began after Cieslik intercepted a text message from a former boyfriend trying to reconnect.
After she got the text earlier in the evening, the woman said, they had a fight and made up, then had sex — during which he began biting her as punishment, she said.
“He finally stopped, and then he started insulting me,” she told the judge. “I asked him to leave, he started to pack, and he told me, ‘Stop crying, or I’m going to f***ing kill you’.”
When she reached for her cellphone, she said, he ripped it out of her hand, snapped the charging cord in half, and threw it across the room.
Cieslik left as she began losing consciousness after being choked, the woman said, her voice shaking.
“I don’t remember putting anything on,” she said.
Testimony in the case was continuing through this afternoon and will resume tomorrow morning.
STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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