Employee admits secretly filming women in Brooklyn Foot Locker restroom: cops
By Oren Yaniv
Danny Martinez, 21, has admitted to cops to filming women with his cell phone camera in a Brooklyn Foot Locker. He was released on $1,000 bail and said that he apologized. (Stephanie Keith for New York Daily News)
A Brooklyn shoe salesman has a worse vice than just a foot fetish — he's accused of being a restroom peeping tom.
A woman who used the bathroom at a Foot Locker in Bath Beach last week was horrified to find a cell phone videotaping her, leading to the arrest of 21-year-old Danny Martinez, she and the authorities told the Daily News.
"I was in shock at first," said Jackie Rico, 23. "Why would you want to do this?"
The ex-employee of the shoe store said she felt even more betrayed because she was the one who hired Martinez when she was an assistant manager and had introduced him to her family.
"The trust I built with him was broken," she said. "I felt violated because I trusted him like my friend."
Rico recalled asking to use the bathroom — typically reserved for employees only — while shopping there last Wednesday.
As she unbuttoned her pants, she noticed a "blinking thingy" on a shelf, hiding behind a dragon figurine that was once handed out with a McDonald's Happy Meal, she said.
She turned the camera off then went to the supervisor at the store, knowing the Android phone must belong to Martinez, whom she noticed leaving the bathroom before she went in.
When the cops were finally called Friday, they found the video showing her, plus one capturing another woman, court papers say.
A former employee at this Bath Beach, Brooklyn, Foot Locker found the cell phone behind a toy on a shelf in the store's restroom. (Stephanie Keith for New York Daily News)
Rico said she "wouldn't want someone to get in trouble," and initially hesitated about pursuing charges. But she then heard that "I was not the first."
Martinez, who admitted the pervy deed to cops, has been arraigned on two counts of unlawful surveillance, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, and was released on a $1,000 bail.
"My actions were really wrong," he told the News when reached by phone. "It was a bad choice to do."
He tried to shrug it off as fun between friends and said he had apologized to both women. He added that it was the first time he had engaged in peeping and promised it won't happen again.
"It will be the last of it," he said.
Rico, who left the Foot Locker job last February after about two years of employment for a position in a Best Western hotel, said Martinez never gave her a creepy vibe when both worked there.
"I would have never suspected something like that," she said.
With Caitlin Nolan