Student helped set up webcam

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A Rutgers University student gave some of the most damaging testimony yet Wednesday in a former classmate's trial for allegedly using a webcam to spy on his roommate's intimate encounter with another man.

Lokesh Ojha described helping the defendant, Dharun Ravi, adjust his webcam so he could get a clear view of his roommate's bed. Authorities say that by then, Ravi had already spied on roommate Tyler Clementi once and that on that night - Sept. 21, 2010 - he intended to do it again.

A day later, Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

After prosecutors finished questioning Ojha, Ravi's lawyer, Steven Altman, cross-examined Ojha, and a more complicated story began to emerge.

Ojha appeared to be fighting back tears as he acknowledged that he did not tell the entire truth under oath in an early meeting with investigators.

"I thought my college career was over," he said quietly as he looked up from staring down at the top of the witness stand.

"Why?" Altman asked.

"Because I helped him," Ojha said. "I helped him set it up."

He got Ojha to say that while he was trying to help Ravi with his webcam, Ravi never told him why he wanted the help.

It was another moment in which Ravi's defense team found some help from a student called as a witness by prosecutors.

On Tuesday, Molly Wei, who was allowed to enter a program to keep her record clean in return for cooperating with the prosecution, told the court that police paperwork got it wrong when she was arrested.

Wei said she was charged with recording and broadcasting video of Clementi's intimate dorm-room encounter, but she said she did neither, though she did admit viewing with Ravi live streamed images.

Ravi is charged with 15 criminal counts, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, a hate crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Most of the witnesses so far have been students who were in their first weeks of college, and now only 19 or 20.

Altman, a veteran lawyer, has taken on a grandfatherly demeanor with some, mixing up "tweets" and "texts" with students who use their own slang. With Ojha, he was harsher, asking if he knew that he could go to jail for lying under oath.

Altman has asked each student a line of questions about whether Ravi ever said bad things about Clementi or gay people generally.

Each has said no, perhaps poking holes in the prosecution's case that Ravi's actions were motivated by malice toward gays.

Ojha, a lanky student who still attends Rutgers, was the first student to say that he tried to connect with Ravi's webcam on Sept. 21, the night Ravi posted on Twitter: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to videochat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it's happening again."

But Ojha didn't say what he expected to see when he was pressed by Altman.

Altman asked why he tried to connect.

"Curiosity," he said, "to see if he was actually going to do it."

"What?" Altman asked.

"To see if Dharun was actually going to stream it," Ojha said.

Ojha testified that he later told Ravi that the webstream didn't work that night. "I said: 'Yo, it didn't work.' He said: 'Yeah, I've been getting that from a lot of people. You've got to brush it off.' "

Ojha is expected to be back on the witness stand Thursday. There's a chance that prosecutors will also call to the stand the man students said they saw kissing Clementi in a streaming video. He's been identified in court papers so far only by his initials, M.B., because prosecutors say he's the victim of a crime. It's not clear how tightly his identity will be protected when he appears in court.

Also Wednesday, jurors heard Clementi's own words for the first time when they were read a bit of an e-mail he sent his resident assistant about the alleged spying.

In the e-mail, Clementi he was "extremely uncomfortable sharing a room with someone who would act in this manner."

But Judge Glenn Berman ruled that further description could not be shared with jurors: Clementi said what he called spying was "wildly inappropriate."