Why an accused Philadelphia police officer is still on the force.
The woman in the emergency room at Frankford Hospital told the detective that the police officer who sexually assaulted her was named Tom. After the attack, she said, the officer scrawled his cellphone number on a torn piece of paper and handed it to her.
Through personnel records, police traced the number to a 10-year veteran of the force, Thomas Tolstoy. Within hours of the alleged assault on Oct. 16, 2008, the officer was pulled off the street.
Three women who did not know one another would eventually accuse Tolstoy of assaulting them under strikingly similar circumstances. Of the three cases, only the one involving the woman from Frankford Hospital led to a full-blown inquiry.
The allegations were investigated by the Philadelphia Police Department's Internal Affairs bureau, the FBI launched an exhaustive inquiry, and the U.S. Attorney's Office convened a grand jury, yet no criminal charges were filed. When news broke this year that there would be no prosecution after years of investigation, many expressed outrage
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