< Back to front page Text size – +

On sunny Marlborough Street, the Rockefeller case begins

E-mail|Link|Comments () May 28, 2009 06:53 PM

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff

The clinical social worker who was supervising a visit last July between the man known as Clark Rockefeller and his 7-year-old daughter recalled today being shoved by Rockefeller on a Boston street and seeing the father scramble into a black SUV with his daughter.

Howard Yaffe said he ran over to the SUV, but Rockefeller closed the door on him, and the SUV drove off. Yaffe, who had his hand on the door, tumbled to the pavement, suffering bruises on his chin, knee and hip and what he said was later diagnosed as a concussion.

Dialing 911 on his cellphone, he told a dispatcher, "A daughter was just kidnapped by her father."

"I was walking down the street, he knocked me over, and ran off in the car," he said in the tape-recorded call, which was played for a Suffolk Superior Court jury today, the first day of testimony in Rockefeller's trial on custodial kidnapping charges.

Yaffe was the first witness to testify. The case drew international attention after Rockefeller's arrest a week later in Baltimore and revelations that he had used multiple aliases and told different stories about himself during the past three decades. Authorities say his real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter and he was born in Germany.

Yaffe said he was walking on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay on a sunny Sunday, casually looking at a building that Rockefeller had pointed out, when suddenly Rockefeller shoved him.