Did a former Philly homicide detective help leak a confidential witness statement?

It was a Friday night in 2018 when prosecutor Cydney Pope, still at her desk in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, received an email unlike any she’d received in her career.

“HELP!” it began. The sender was a cooperating witness to a slaying — and he told Pope confidential documents identifying him had been leaked and posted on Instagram, labeling him a rat.

Pope asked police to sit outside the man’s house that night. Then the prosecutor had him temporarily moved into a hotel. He has since left Pennsylvania, and Pope told jurors Friday the episode — the only time in 10 years she’s had a witness’ secret materials shared online — still bothers her.

“I think he felt betrayed,” she said of the witness. “There’s only one reason to post something like that. And that’s to get someone killed.”

Pope’s testimony came as part of the sexual assault trial for fired homicide detective Philip Nordo — with prosecutors saying the man whose testimony was leaked had been an informant for Nordo, and someone Nordo had tried to kiss and grope in an elevator two years earlier. (The Inquirer does not name people who say they’ve been sexually assaulted without their permission).

Still, although prosecutors were seeking to link the leak to Nordo — who’s been charged with obstruction and official oppression in addition to several sex crimes — what they did not prove Friday was that he had a clear role in the documents ending up on the internet.

Nordo has denied any wrongdoing.

During testimony, prosecutors used witnesses to show Nordo was the assigned detective on the West Philadelphia slaying involving the cooperator — a 2015 killing connected to several other shootings in the neighborhood.

Pope said Nordo would have been one of very few people with access to the documents that later appeared online. And another homicide detective, Theodore Hagan, told jurors that in the current homicide case file, one of the documents related to the cooperating witness was missing, while others appeared to be incomplete copies.

Nordo’s defense lawyers fought back against the suggestion he might have stolen the documents (and he has not been charged with doing so). During cross examination, witnesses acknowledged the materials could have gone missing or been printed incorrectly due to routine or mundane clerical issues that had nothing to do with Nordo.

And attorney Abigail Cohen also presented text messages and videos that appeared to show the brother of a suspected shooter possessing the documents months before they were posted on social media — an attempt to suggest that man, not Nordo, was more likely to have posted them.

Pope told jurors Nordo might have had a link to the suspected shooter: When prosecutors searched the man’s phone in 2015, she said, Nordo’s number was saved in the contacts list.

But how or whether that might suggest Nordo had any role in the Instagram episode will now be left to jurors to decide.

In other testimony this week, prosecutors presented three main witnesses who accused Nordo of varying levels of sexual abuse. On Friday, they called a series of lawyers and police officers in an attempt to corroborate some portions of the witnesses’ accounts, including the Instagram incident one of them described on the stand.

In testimony Thursday, that man recalled being alarmed by the publication of his statement on social media and said he had to reach out to Pope for help. He did not report being physically attacked after that.

Nordo’s attorneys have sought to challenge the credibility of his accusers, highlighting inconsistencies or contradictions in their testimony.

The trial was expected to resume Monday.