Published: March 18, 2008
Jurors deliberated for a third day on Monday without reaching a verdict in the trial of Cesar Rodriguez, who is accused of fatally beating his 7-year-old stepdaughter,
Nixzmary Brown.The jurors’ questions for the judge indicate they may be bouncing among the three most serious charges against Mr. Rodriguez — second-degree murder and first- and second-degree manslaughter.On Friday, just before breaking for the weekend, the jury asked Justice L. Priscilla Hall of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn to repeat the definition of the most serious charge facing Mr. Rodriguez: second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of up to life in prison.
On Monday morning, Mr. Rodriguez’s defense team was briefly buoyed by the jurors’ request for the definition of second-degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.
A few minutes later, though, the jurors asked for the legal definition of first-degree manslaughter, a charge that could bring a sentence of up to 25 years. After lunch, they asked once again for a reading of the top charge. (The jurors are prohibited from carrying a written version of the charges to the jury room with them.)
Nixzmary was found dead of severe head injuries in her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant in January 2006. Mr. Rodriguez, 29, who admitted to prosecutors that he beat Nixzmary regularly, and with particular severity the night she died, has said that he did not deal the fatal blow, and that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, did. He can be found guilty if the jury determines either that he alone killed Nixzmary or that he helped Ms. Santiago kill her.
Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers have said that Ms. Santiago, who faces the same charges and will be tried later, killed Nixzmary on her own.
The jurors are to resume deliberating Tuesday morning.
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By ANDY NEWMAN 16 minutes ago
A jury acquitted Cesar Rodriguez, the stepfather of the 7-year-old girl, of second-degree murder, but convicted him of a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter.
Published: March 18, 2008
A jury in Brooklyn acquitted Cesar Rodriguez, the stepfather of 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown, of second-degree murder Tuesday, but convicted him of a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter, for fatally beating her as punishment for stealing a snack and jamming his computer printer with toys.
Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, via Associated Press
Cesar Rodriguez was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in the death of his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown.
The lower charge carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison; second-degree murder carries a possible life sentence.
The verdict, reached on the fourth day of deliberations after an eight-week trial, brought an end to the first trial in one of the most horrific child deaths in the city’s recent history, one that triggered an overhaul of the city’s child welfare system. Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, is to be tried later on murder charges.
The difference between second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter is subtle. In convicting Mr. Rodriguez, 29, of first-degree manslaughter, the jury determined that Mr. Rodriguez had caused Nixzmary’s death by recklessly engaging in conduct that created a grave risk of serious physical injury. To find him guilty of second-degree murder, the jury would have had to determine that he acted with “depraved indifference to human life.”
During the eight-week trial, Mr. Rodriguez’s main lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, told jurors that though Mr. Rodriguez, who admitted beating Nixzmary regularly, was a child abuser, he was not a killer and that he never thought any of his beatings would cause Nixzmary’s death.
As the foreman of the 10-woman, 2-man jury in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn declared Mr. Rodriguez “not guilty” of the top charge, Mr. Rodriguez looked down. One of his lawyers, Barry Deonarine, put an arm around his shoulder. Mr. Rodriguez continued to look down as the foreman read the rest of the 12 verdicts, most of them guilty. Eventually, he closed his eyes.
After the verdict was read, Ana Dwimoh, the lead prosecutor, told reporters outside the courthouse that she would not comment on whether she was satisfied with the verdict.
“The bottom line is that the jury has spoken,” Ms. Dwimoh said.
A law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said with a shrug of the shoulders, “It could be worse.”
One juror, Terrence Cobwell, said afterward, “We would have liked to have upped the charges but the prosecution didn’t really give us enough.”
He said the mood inside the jury room had been tense, just as the mood throughout the trial had been.
Mr. Cobwell said the verdict had been “sort of” a compromise. “We just wanted justice for the little girl,” he said.
Mr. Rodriguez’s main lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, who complained throughout the trial that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence, had mixed emotions afterward.
“It’s rewarding given what we had to work with,” he said, “but it’s unconscionable because the prosecutors cheated, and that will form the basis of our appeal.”
Nixzmary lived and died in a two-bedroom apartment on Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant with her mother, her stepfather and five half-siblings. At the trial, a portrait emerged of a poor family plunged into chaos after Ms. Santiago had a miscarriage in late November 2005, less than a year after giving birth to her sixth child. Ms. Santiago was depressed, and, according to many sources, blamed Nixzmary for the miscarriage and called her a devil.
The parents stopped sending the children to school regularly. Mr. Rodriguez lost his job as a security guard. He said he began to beat Nixzmary daily and to tie her to a chair with duct tape, rope and bungee cords because she was trying to harm her siblings and destroying the family’s precious food supplies.
Nixzmary’s injuries did not escape the notice of her teachers on the rare occasions she came to school. They notified the city’s
Administration for Children’s Services, which sent workers to the family’s home several times in early January 2006 but failed to make meaningful contact with the family, in part because Mr. Rodriguez was unreceptive.
On Jan. 10, 2006, the welfare agency assigned case workers to visit the home after hours, but the case workers decided to wait till the morning.
Before dawn on Jan. 11, Ms. Santiago woke an upstairs neighbor and asked her to call 911, saying that Nixzmary had drowned. Paramedics found her dead on the floor, most of her rail-thin body covered with cuts and bruises and black eyes in various stages of healing. An autopsy revealed that she had died of bleeding on the brain caused by blows to the head.
In the hours that followed, Mr. Rodriguez gave a series of statements to detectives and prosecutors in which he said that on the last night of Nixzmary’s life, she got in trouble for taking a snack from the refrigerator — a yogurt or pudding — without permission and for jamming his computer printer with toys. He said he had pounded her with his hands, demanding to know why she was so destructive, and had shoved her head under a cold bathtub faucet.
When he was done, he said, he feared he had beaten her more seriously that night than he ever had before, that she looked “more pale than any other day,” would not meet his gaze and appeared “dazed out.” He says that after beating her, he left her moaning and went to his room, and that when his wife told him she was concerned that Nixzmary was having trouble breathing, he told her not to worry because “I thought it was just one of her scams.”
A medical examiner testified at the trial that Nixzmary was actually passing through the stages of death from bleeding on the brain: headache, nausea, confusion, sleepiness, coma, respiratory depression.
After Nixzmary’s death, and reports of multiple missed opportunities to intervene in the girl’s short, sad life, Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg declared, ”We, as a city, have failed this child.” The city overhauled the Administration for Children’s Services, firing more than a dozen officials at the agency and putting new safeguards in place. Nixzmary’s death also sparked a surge in child-abuse reports and placement of children into foster care.
Both parents were charged with murder and were originally to be tried together. But Ms. Santiago’s case was held up so many times that prosecutors severed the cases to bring Mr. Rodriguez to trial first.
The trial, plagued by delays, legal bickering, relaxed punctuality and a general air of glacially unfolding chaos, dragged on for more than eight weeks.
Prosecutors relied heavily on Mr. Rodriguez’s statements and on visceral visual aids to make their case: graphic photos of Nixzmary’s savaged body; ruined tokens of innocence like a bloodstained Donald Duck pillow; the school chair and the duct tape that bound it to her; and the litter box into which she was forced to defecate when locked in her room.
Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Rodriguez’s main lawyer, staked his case on a claim that while Mr. Rodriguez beat Nixzmary, it was Ms. Santiago who struck the fatal blow. Because Mr. Rodriguez was charged not only with killing Nixzmary himself but also with helping Ms. Santiago kill Nixzmary and with failing to get her medical attention, Mr. Schwartz needed to persuade the jurors that Ms. Santiago bore all the blame for the girl’s death.
He portrayed Mr. Rodriguez as a hard-working, caring father and Ms. Santiago as an unstable, erratic woman who had had children by four different men by the time she was 26. After her miscarriage, Mr. Schwartz said, Ms. Santiago grew violent, beating Nixzmary badly enough for her to require stitches. Mr. Schwartz frequently referred to a jar that Ms. Santiago kept on her dresser containing placental tissue that she said was from her miscarriage.
Mr. Schwartz promised the jurors at the beginning of the trial that they would hear in Ms. Santiago’s own words that she beat Nixzmary until she was lifeless.
But when the testimony finally came, it turned out to be an allegation that Ms. Santiago had told a friend in jail that she had dreamed she beat Nixzmary lifeless. The jailhouse friend, a convicted con artist who befriended Ms. Santiago while working as a suicide prevention aide on her unit, said that Ms. Santiago had told her that in real life, she and Mr. Rodriguez killed Nixzmary together.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.
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JURORS INQUIRE ABOUT CHARGES IN DEATH OF GIRL
JURY ASKS CLARIFICATION IN DEATH OF GIRL, 7
By ANNIE CORREAL
Published: March 15, 2008
A jury considering the fate of Cesar Rodriguez, the Brooklyn man charged with killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter,
Nixzmary Brown, asked a judge on Friday to read back the definition of the second-degree murder charge he faces.That request, which could indicate what the 12 jurors are considering, came less than an hour before they stopped for the weekend.Mr. Rodriguez is charged with second-degree murder, first- and second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the January 2006 killing.
Nixzmary Brown was found dead of a severe brain injury in her family’s apartment on Jan. 11, 2006. During Mr. Rodriguez’s trial, which has lasted two months, the prosecution tried to show that his beatings of Nixzmary Brown leading up to that injury contributed to her death.
The defense has tried to convince the jury that although Mr. Rodriguez admitted to the police that he had hit the girl and tied her to a chair in the weeks before she died, it was her mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who inflicted the fatal head wound. Ms. Santiago will be tried separately.
In addition to hearing the second-degree murder charge, the jury also asked to hear one of the jury instructions read back to them: that they consider whether two people acted together in committing the killing.
“Can we hear the in-concert instruction and second-degree murder charge and then immediately be released to deliberate?” read the jury’s note.
After the judge read the requested definitions, the jury deliberated for 15 minutes before stopping. They are to resume Monday.
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JURORS ASK FOR EVIDENCE IN KILLING OF 7-YEAR-OLD
By ANNIE CORREAL
Published: March 14, 2008
A jury in the trial of Cesar Rodriguez, who is accused of killing 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown, asked the judge on Thursday to view several pieces of evidence, including pictures of the dead girl and Mr. Rodriguez’s statements.The 12 jurors began their deliberations at midday.When Nixzmary was found dead of a severe brain injury in her family’s Brooklyn apartment on Jan. 11, 2006, she was severely underweight and covered in bruises and cuts.
The prosecution has argued that Mr. Rodriguez killed Nixzmary, his stepdaughter, after weeks of beating her about the head and body and slamming her head against hard surfaces.
Though Mr. Rodriguez admitted that he had beaten the girl and had tied her to a chair, his lawyers contend that the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, was responsible for the fatal blow. Ms. Santiago will be tried separately.
About two hours after deliberations began, the jury sent a note to L. Priscilla Hall, the presiding justice in the case.
The judge ruled that the jury could see the written, oral and videotaped statements made by Mr. Rodriguez, the written and oral statements made by Ms. Santiago, Nixzmary’s pediatric records, the medical examiner’s report and photographs of Nixzmary’s body. The jury also requested, and received, permission to view receipts from a shopping trip to Target that prosecutors claim show that Nixzmary was left at home alone — at a point when the girl may have already been dying from the head injury she sustained.
The judge ruled that the jury could not view the report from emergency medical technicians who responded to the 911 call or the diary of a witness — believed to be a fellow inmate of Ms. Santiago’s — who testified in the trial, because neither item had been admitted into evidence.
The jury also requested the testimony of the medical examiner, Barbara A. Sampson, to address questions, the note said, about whether Nixzmary would have died if she had received prompt medical attention and about the brain injury that caused her death.
Mr. Rodriguez is charged with second-degree murder, first- and second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, first-degree unlawful imprisonment, fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. The judge instructed the jury to consider that Mr. Rodriguez was acting in concert with Ms. Santiago in committing these crimes.
Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, asked again for a mistrial on Thursday, on the ground that the lead prosecutor’s closing statements the day before had been “unduly inflammatory.” His motion was denied.
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JURY IS ABOUT TO DECIDE THE FATE OF DEAD GIRL’S STEPFATHER
Published: March 13, 2008
The photo hung above Cesar Rodriguez’s head.It showed the body of a little girl clad only in oversize red pants, lying on a floor. Her left index finger was raised heavenward, as if about to make one last point. Her right arm — painfully, distortedly bony — lay across her chest. Her eyes were surrounded by crude black circles; her chin bore a jagged black gash.The girl was Mr. Rodriguez’s 7-year-old stepdaughter,
Nixzmary Brown. For more than an hour on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, a prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, kept the photo on a screen as she delivered her closing arguments in Mr. Rodriguez’s murder trial.
“Look at that photo,” Ms. Dwimoh told the jurors. “Come on. She’s screaming out: ‘Help me! Help me! Somebody help me!’ And her moans and her groans weren’t loud enough for Cesar.”
Mr. Rodriguez, 29, is charged with murdering Nixzmary under three separate theories — that he fatally beat her, that he failed to get her prompt medical attention as she lay dying and that he helped Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, cause her death. The jury of 10 women and 2 men, who were expected to begin deliberations on Thursday, will be instructed that they may convict him under any of the theories.
Mr. Rodriguez, in statements to the police and prosecutors made on Jan. 11, 2006, the day Nixzmary’s body was found in her Brooklyn apartment, admitted beating her regularly in the weeks leading up to her death from severe brain bleeding.
He admitted, Ms. Dwimoh reminded the jurors, that on the last night of Nixzmary’s life, he was worried that he had beaten her more than ever before, as punishment for jamming his computer printer. But Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, has argued that it was Ms. Santiago, angry at Nixzmary because she believed she had caused a recent miscarriage, who struck the fatal blow. Mr. Rodriguez, Mr. Schwartz said, had nothing to do with Nixzmary’s death. Ms. Santiago is also charged with murder and is to be tried later.
“Cesar Rodriguez is a child abuser,” Mr. Schwartz told the jury in his summation. “But you have not seen any evidence in this courtroom that has proven beyond a reasonable doubt any murder or manslaughter charges.” Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Dwimoh said, admitted that when his wife told him after his final beating that Nixzmary was having trouble breathing, he dismissed her concern, telling her the child was faking. But Mr. Schwartz told the jurors that Mr. Rodriguez was not worried about Nixzmary because he had done nothing “he thought would seriously jeopardize her in any way.”
Mr. Schwartz dissected the prosecution’s case and pointed out what he said were inconsistencies and shoddy medical and police work. Investigators, he said, took DNA samples only from Mr. Rodriguez, not from Ms. Santiago. The prosecution’s claim that Nixzmary died of both head injuries and chronic child abuse syndrome was contradicted by a veteran medical examiner called by Mr. Schwartz, who said she died only of head injuries.
Because Nixzmary’s death was not linked to long-term abuse at the hands of Mr. Rodriguez, Mr. Schwartz said, the prosecutors were left only with the head injuries, which they could not prove Mr. Rodriguez had inflicted.
Ms. Dwimoh did not address most of Mr. Schwartz’s claims. She went for emotional impact, approaching Mr. Rodriguez at the defense table, pointing at him and locking eyes with him.
“You battered a little girl who weighed 36 pounds,” she told him. “When she was on the floor, in that room you imprisoned her in, you turned your back.”
As Ms. Dwimoh spoke, Mr. Schwartz was seen drawing a cartoon on a legal pad showing her saying: “Blah blah blah. Photos photos photos.”
Mr. Schwartz did make one emotional appeal to the jury. He began and ended by reciting the title of a book that his star witness, a con artist and a jailhouse friend of Ms. Santiago’s, testified she was considering writing: “Mama, Why Did You Kill Me?”
Ms. Dwimoh rebutted him, reading the jurors a portion of the jailhouse witness’s testimony.
“ ‘She told me her child was a bad kid,’ ” Ms. Dwimoh read, “ ‘and her and her husband killed her.’ ”
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FRUSTRATED DEFENSE RESTS CASE IN BEATING DEATH OF 7-YEAR-OLD
Published: March 12, 2008
Lawyers for Cesar Rodriguez, accused of murdering his 7-year-old stepdaughter,
Nixzmary Brown, abruptly rested their case on Tuesday after the judge rejected their attempts to undo the damage caused last week by one of their own witnesses.Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers had called the witness, a jailhouse acquaintance of Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, hoping that she would say Ms. Santiago had confessed to the killing. The witness said Ms. Santiago had told her that both she and Mr. Rodriguez had killed the girl, and also that Mr. Rodriguez had sexually abused Nixzmary.On Tuesday, the lawyers hoped to call a psychiatrist who had examined Nixzmary’s mother, to counter the account of sexual abuse. But Justice L. Priscilla Hall of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn denied the request, saying that the psychiatrist could offer only hearsay evidence.Mr. Rodriguez is charged with second-degree murder in the beating death of Nixzmary in January 2006. His defense has tried to shift the blame for the fatal beating to Ms. Santiago, whose murder trial is to come.
The chief lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, on Tuesday asked Justice Hall — for at least the fourth time in the case — for a mistrial, saying that prosecutors had repeatedly withheld evidence that could help exonerate Mr. Rodriguez.
When the judge was unreceptive to his request, Mr. Schwartz appeared to throw up his hands.
“We ask that your honor do the right thing and put this case to death,” he said, “because based on everything going on in this trial, we have been really unable to render a quality defense.”
The jury is likely to begin hearing closing arguments in the case on Wednesday.
Mr. Schwartz said after court that while he believed he had “built a pretty strong case riddled with reasonable doubt,” it was hard to be confident in a case that he said had been “in a way, rigged” against Mr. Rodriguez from the start.
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MOTHER TOLD OF HELPING TO KILL, INMATE TESTIFIES
Published: March 8, 2008
For weeks, defense lawyers for the stepfather of
Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old girl who was beaten to death in Brooklyn, have been promising that jurors would hear bombshell testimony that Nixzmary’s mother had admitted killing her.
The Spanish-language media in New York have followed the Nixzmary Brown case closely, partly because the family is Hispanic.
On Friday, that testimony, given earlier in the week by a secret witness who was incarcerated with Nixzmary’s mother at Rikers Island, was unsealed.
In it, the witness, who awaits sentencing in a fraud case, stated that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, did indeed speak of having killed Nixzmary — in a dream.
“She dreamt that they were beating the child in the bathtub, that they were using his fists to beat her up and he walked away and she stayed, keeps going and Nixzmary became lifeless,” the witness said, referring to Ms. Santiago and her husband, Cesar Rodriguez.
Ms. Santiago told the witness that in real life, she and Mr. Rodriguez killed Nixzmary together, the witness said.
“She told me her child was a bad kid and her and her husband killed her,” the witness said under questioning by Mr. Rodriguez’s own lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz.
Mr. Rodriguez, who is on trial on charges of second-degree murder, is accused both of beating Nixzmary to death himself and of helping Ms. Santiago kill Nixzmary in January 2006. The jury will be instructed to convict him if it finds either charge true. Ms. Santiago is also charged with second-degree murder and will be tried later.
The witness, who is awaiting sentencing on grand larceny charges, was allowed to testify in secret in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday because of concerns about her safety.
The witness said that Ms. Santiago was haunted by the dream about the bathtub beating. The witness also offered another version of it, in which Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago were slamming Nixzmary’s head on the tub together. “She kept having a dream of that night when they had her in the bathtub and they were banging her head in the tub,” the witness said.
Mr. Rodriguez has admitted beating Nixzmary daily in the weeks leading up to her death and with his hands and a belt the night she died of severe head injuries. But Mr. Schwartz has said that it was Ms. Santiago who delivered the fatal blow, in the bathroom of the family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The witness also mentioned several times that Ms. Santiago was angry at Nixzmary because she had found the girl performing a sexual act on Mr. Rodriguez, but it was not clear from the testimony whether that was in a dream or in real life.
Mr. Rodriguez was initially charged with sexually abusing Nixzmary, but prosecutors dropped the charges because they said that to press them they would have had to call her siblings to testify.
The witness, who admitted to fraud valued at at least $2 million, testified that she got to know Ms. Santiago a few months after Nixzmary’s death while working as a suicide prevention aide at the jail. She said she kept notes on their conversations for a book she planned to write.
Notes the witness made in her diaries indicate that she was considering the title “Mama, Why Did You Kill Me?” for her book.
The witness acknowledged on cross-examination that in 2006, she showed her notes to prosecutors. When she was asked if she did so to try to get a reduced sentence — she faces up to 15 years or up to 9 years plus restitution — she answered in the qualified affirmative.
“Yes, the information I had, I thought it was helping to you guys,” she said, “so obviously bringing it in, I thought it would be helpful to you. It is typical that something could happen.”
The witness said the prosecutors offered her no deal after seeing her notes.
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COVERING A NOTORIOUS CRIME IN SPANISH: FASCINATION, AND A DIFFERENT ANGLE
By ANNIE CORREAL
Published: March 8, 2008
As the crowd shuffles out of the Brooklyn courtroom where Cesar Rodriguez is being tried in the killing of his stepdaughter, a small group of reporters gathers around his lawyers.
The Spanish-language media in New York have followed the Nixzmary Brown case closely, partly because the family is Hispanic.
“If he didn’t do it, then who did?” asks Wanda Silva, a reporter for WXTV, Channel 41, the Univision Spanish-language television station in New York.
“It was her mother,” says one of the lawyers, Barry Deonarine, using his school-learned Spanish to field questions from Spanish-language reporters.
The killing of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown in January 2006 and the trial of Mr. Rodriguez have attracted intense coverage in the English-language press. And they have received at least as much, if not more, attention in the Spanish-language news media. Nixzmary’s family is Hispanic.
Like their English-language counterparts, the Spanish-language media have recounted the emotional trial testimony and the grim details of the abuse inflicted on Nixzmary before she died. And they have chronicled the efforts by Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers to shift blame for the girl’s death onto her mother, Nixzaliz Santiago. Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago, who will be tried separately, are both charged with second-degree murder.
But there are subtle yet clear differences in the tone and the themes in the coverage.
While the English-language tabloids have tended to demonize Mr. Rodriguez, the Spanish-language news media have been somewhat more sympathetic, noting the challenges he faced in trying to provide for and discipline six children.
And in articles, reader comments on newspaper Web sites and television segments, Ms. Santiago has been castigated for what some view as failing in her fundamental responsibility as a mother to keep her daughter safe.
“The worst thing is that the repellent behavior of Rodriguez depended on the complicity of the little one’s mother, who turned a blind eye toward the constant and daily abuse of her daughter until the day when she was confronted with the frightening reality of the blows,” Miguel Cruz Tejada, a New York correspondent for El Nuevo Diario, a newspaper based in the Dominican Republic, wrote on Jan. 17.
Among Spanish-language news outlets, the trial has been covered daily by the newspaper El Diario-La Prensa and by New York 1 Noticias, an all-news cable television station. The newspapers El Nuevo Diario and Hoy Nueva York and Telemundo’s Channel 47 and Univision’s 41 have also produced reports on the trial. Articles in Spanish by the Associated Press and the Spanish-language news agencies EFE and Notimex have been published in newspapers around Latin America, including in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
The daily coverage in El Diario-La Prensa has consistently been the most-read or second most-read item on the newspaper’s Web site and has drawn reader comments from beyond New York.
“There’s definitely a sense of community involvement in the case,” said Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, the editor of El Diario-La Prensa, which has a special online supplement on the trial titled, “Nixzmary Brown Case Roils New York.”
“It’s not a community full of alienated people who fall down black holes often — but obviously, it happened here,” he said.
Mr. Rodriguez, 29, was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his family when he was 6. Ms. Santiago, 29, was raised in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, and came to New York as a teenager. The couple lived in an apartment in Brooklyn with their six children, four of them from Ms. Santiago’s previous relationships. Mr. Rodriguez worked as a security guard.
El Diario-La Prensa’s coverage has occasionally emphasized the picture painted by the defense of Mr. Rodriguez as a hard-working immigrant laboring under the stress of caring for a large family.
On Jan. 23, an article under the headline, “They Portray Rodriguez as a Good Father” was accompanied by a photograph of Mr. Rodriguez doubled over and grimacing, with a hand on his back, as he was arrested two years ago. The article describes a coffee mug found in the house that read, “World’s Greatest Dad.”
That contrasts sharply with how Mr. Rodriguez has been portrayed in parts of the English-language press. The New York Post has published headlines like “Ghoul’s Tools of Torture,” “Images of Her Agony,” and “This Face of Evil Isn’t Even Human.”
“Many times in this job I have been summoned to look upon faces of pure evil,” Andrea Peyser, a Post columnist, wrote on Jan. 17. “Most of the time, I’ve been struck by how human these monsters appear. But yesterday, I looked on the face of unadulterated poison.”
And the defense claim that Mr. Rodriguez — who has admitted to beating Nixzmary daily and to tying her to a chair in the weeks before she died — was justified in disciplining her because she was a mischief-maker who tormented her siblings, earned derisive responses.
Typical was an article published in The New York Daily News on Jan. 17 in which Scott Shifrel and Tracy Connor describe what they call “the defense’s shocking blame-the-victim strategy,” and quote the prosecutor at length:
“Prosecutors scoffed at the defense’s claim that Rodriguez was just an overwrought family man by reciting the outrages Nixzmary endured. ‘He was no daddy,’ Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh said. ‘Daddies don’t beat their little girls to the extent that all they can do is moan. Daddies don’t blame their children for their actions. Murderers do.’ ”
Luz Plasencia, a reporter for New York 1 Noticias who has covered the case for the past two years, says that in some Hispanic families, Nixzmary’s behavior would earn a slap or a spanking.
“I don’t think anyone doubts that this was out of hand and abusive, but I think what this raises is the discipline issue,” she said. “Americans will tell their kids, ‘Let’s have a time-out.’ Latinos don’t go there.”
“Some things are definitely relevant to a Spanish-speaking audience,” Ms. Plasencia said. “When they started saying she was this unruly child, I asked him to tell me more,” she added, referring to Mr. Deonarine, Mr. Rodriguez’s Spanish-speaking lawyer.
And while the Spanish-language coverage has extensively described the evidence of Mr. Rodriguez’s repeated abuse of Nixzmary, Ms. Santiago has been criticized by some Hispanic commentators who believe the primary duty for protecting a child falls to the mother.
Maria Elena Salinas, a news anchor for Univision, wrote in a syndicated column in February 2006: “Although the system has failed these children, it’s not the bureaucracy that killed them. Some people simply don’t have the capacity to be parents and some unmarried mothers don’t have the conscience to put the safety of their children above their romantic interests.”
Comments and reader responses in Spanish on the Internet, a great number of which have come from women, have also focused in general on Ms. Santiago.
In response to Mr. Tejada’s article in El Nuevo Diario, a reader who identified herself as Dalila Uffre from Rhode Island wrote, “It’s a shame that there are mothers in these situations and who permit brutal abuse.”
Another reader commenting on an article by Mr. Tejada published on Jan. 31, 2006, who identified herself as Susana from the Bronx, wrote, “Hopefully this case will serve as an example so cases like this won’t be repeated, not just here but anywhere on the planet. A piece of advice for young mothers: first mother, then wife, please.”
Alejandra Soto, another reporter who has covered the trial for New York 1 Noticias, said of the Hispanic press coverage: “There is a big question about who the bigger monster was. She is the birth mother, while Cesar is the stepfather. She needed to draw the line between discipline and abuse.”
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RELATIVE SAYS SLAIN GIRL FEARED STEPFATHER
Published: March 7, 2008
Throughout the trial for the murder of 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown, her stepfather’s lawyers have said that the girl’s mother, reeling from postpartum depression and mental illness, fatally struck her child.For two days this week in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, the lawyers have put Nixzmary’s maternal grandmother on the stand, hoping to elicit an unflattering picture of the mother’s mental state.The effort has not been entirely successful.The grandmother, Maria Gonzalez, testified on Thursday that her six grandchildren lived in fear of their stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, who is on trial for Nixzmary’s murder. (Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, was also charged with the murder and is to be tried later.)“They had a respect for him, but it wasn’t a respect out of love, it was a respect out of fear,” Ms. Gonzalez said through a Spanish interpreter. “As soon as he would get home, right away they would run off to their room.”
Ms. Gonzalez also testified that she saw Mr. Rodriguez shake Nixzmary when she was staying with the family in Bedford-Stuyvesant in November 2005, two months before Nixzmary died.
On cross-examination by prosecutors, Ms. Gonzalez testified that Mr. Rodriguez controlled the household and made all the decisions about food and medical care. Mr. Rodriguez, who has admitted giving Nixzmary a vicious beating the night of her death, is charged with causing her death in three ways: by beating her, by failing to get her medical help as she lay dying of bleeding on the brain, and by helping Ms. Santiago cause her death.
Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, pointed out that in a Family Court proceeding last year, in which Ms. Gonzalez was trying to gain custody of the grandchildren, she testified that she had seen no sign of trouble in the family during her November 2005 visit. Outside the courtroom, Mr. Schwartz accused Ms. Gonzalez of perjury.
As for Ms. Santiago’s mental state, Ms. Gonzalez testified that during that 2005 visit, her daughter had seemed “depressed and sad” about her household life and “had an obsession with cleaning.” Ms. Santiago, then 27, had recently given birth to her sixth child and was pregnant with a seventh, which she lost in a miscarriage a few weeks later.
Ms. Gonzalez’s testimony was scheduled to continue on Friday.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.**********************************************************************************************
PROSECUTION PLAYS DEFENSE ON HOW GIRL WAS KILLED
Published: February 27, 2008
Prosecutors in the trial of a man charged in the killing of
Nixzmary Brown went on the defensive for the first time on Tuesday, aggressively cross-examining a medical expert called by the defense who had disputed the prosecution’s theory that long-term abuse helped cause the girl’s death.But though the expert, Charles V. Wetli, a former Suffolk County medical examiner, acknowledged that beatings, low weight and pneumonia had left Nixzmary in a “medically compromised state,” he insisted that Nixzmary, 7, died only from a blow to the head. Prosecutors in the trial of Nixzmary’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, have maintained that she was killed by a blow compounded by “child abuse syndrome,” the long-term effects of abuse and neglect.Child-abuse syndrome is important to the case against Mr. Rodriguez because though he has stated he beat Nixzmary daily for weeks before her death, prosecutors have not said that he delivered a fatal blow to her head. Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers contend that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who will be tried later, struck the fatal blow.After citing the beatings that Mr. Rodriguez said he regularly inflicted on Nixzmary and the fact that she was underweight at the time of her death, the lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, asked Dr. Wetli, “Doctor, isn’t this classic child abuse syndrome?”Dr. Wetli replied that it was not.“It’s child abuse without the child abuse syndrome,” he said, explaining that child abuse syndrome is considered a cause of death only in the absence of any clear cause. He said that Nixzmary died of a massive brain bruise inflicted by a blow not long before her death on Jan. 11, 2006.
Ms. Dwimoh also took the opportunity to show Dr. Wetli — and the jurors, for the third time in the trial — the videotaped statement Mr. Rodriguez made the day of Nixzmary’s death. In her questions to Dr. Wetli before and after showing the tape, Ms. Dwimoh appeared to tease out an account of Nixzmary’s final hours through Mr. Rodriguez’s words.
Mr. Rodriguez says on the tape that he feared he had beaten Nixzmary more seriously that night than he ever had before, and that she looked “more pale than any other day,” would not meet his gaze and appeared “dazed out.” He says that after beating her, he left her moaning and went to his room, and that when his wife told him she was concerned that Nixzmary was having trouble breathing, he told her not to worry because “I thought it was just one of her scams.”
Ms. Dwimoh asked Dr. Wetli if prompt medical attention after the blow to the head might have prevented the girl’s death. Yes, he replied. Besides being charged with directly causing Nixzmary’s death, Mr. Rodriguez is charged with causing her death by failing to get her medical help.
But many narratives can be constructed from a videotaped statement.
Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, pointed out to Dr. Wetli that while Mr. Rodriguez freely admitted on the tape to beating Nixzmary, he said he did not recall delivering a blow to the head that night.
“Is there anything you saw in the statement of Cesar Rodriguez where he actually admitted to taking Nixzmary Brown’s head and smashing it against a solid object?” Mr. Schwartz asked.
“There was nothing in the statement that indicated that,” Dr. Wetli said.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.*************************************************************************************************
DEFENSE CASTS GIRL’S INJURY AS SOLE CAUSE OF HER DEATH
Published: February 26, 2008
A veteran medical examiner testified on Monday that 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown died solely from a blow to the head — not from the blow combined with chronic abuse and malnutrition, as the prosecution contends.The doctor, called by the lawyer for Nixzmary’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, contradicted the contention by prosecutors that Nixzmary died of “child-abuse syndrome,” culminating in a blow to the head in the final days of her life in January 2006.The claim of child-abuse syndrome as a cause of death has been central to the prosecution’s case against Mr. Rodriguez, who is charged with murder. Mr. Rodriguez, 29, has admitted administering regular, severe beatings to Nixzmary in the last weeks of her life, but prosecutors have not said that he delivered the fatal blow to the head. Mr. Rodriguez’s lead lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, says that blow was dealt by Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who like Mr. Rodriguez is charged with second-degree murder and who will be tried later.During the six weeks of the trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, prosecutors have repeatedly shown jurors gruesome photographs of Nixzmary’s battered body and cited the fact that she weighed only 36 pounds at the time of her death — about as much as a normal 4-year-old — as evidence of the abuse they say she endured.But the doctor who testified on Monday, Charles V. Wetli, the retired chief medical examiner for Suffolk County, said that child-abuse syndrome, which a New York City medical examiner cited earlier in the trial as one of the causes of death, was an inappropriate diagnosis because it is a catchall that is typically used only when there is no other clear cause of death.In Nixzmary’s case, Dr. Wetli said, there was clearly a single cause of death: a massive bruising on her brain, or subdural hematoma, inflicted by smashing her head into a stationary object sometime not long before her death. “If you take away the head injury to this child, there is no reason for this child to have died in this time and place,” said Dr. Wetli, who said he based his testimony on a review of autopsy records and slides of tissue samples.The city’s medical examiner had called the blow to the brain “the straw that broke the camel’s back” after prolonged abuse and neglect. In statements made to the police the day of Nixzmary’s death, Mr. Rodriguez said that the night before, he had beaten Nixzmary with his hands and a belt and had held her head under a running tub faucet. He also said he might have thrown her to the floor, an action that Dr. Wetli said Monday could cause the type of brain injury that led to her death. Mr. Rodriguez also said that when he left Nixzmary in a room after administering his final beating, he was concerned that he might have injured her more seriously than ever before.Even if jurors are persuaded that there is reasonable doubt that Mr. Rodriguez caused Nixzmary’s death directly, they could still convict him of murder. This is because he is charged both with killing Nixzmary and with helping Ms. Santiago cause her death.
Dr. Wetli, who said that he had performed more than 7,500 autopsies over the course of his career, said that there were no signs of malnutrition in Nixzmary’s blood work and microscopic slides of her fat cells that he examined.
And he took issue with the timeline offered earlier in the trial by the city’s first chief deputy medical examiner, Barbara A. Sampson, who testified for the prosecution. Dr. Sampson testified that Nixzmary’s fatal head injury was probably inflicted two days before her death, and that she was unconscious for more than 13 hours and dead for more than 7 hours before her parents sought medical help.
Dr. Wetli said that in his analysis, the fatal injury appeared to have been inflicted “6 or 8 hours” before death. He said that the methods that the city employed could not be used to pinpoint a time of death nearly as specifically as Dr. Sampson had done.
Prosecutors declined to comment on Dr. Wetli’s testimony pending their cross-examination of him, scheduled for Tuesday.
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DOCTOR SAYS EXAM OF GIRL REVEALED SINGLE INJURY
Published: February 22, 2008
An emergency room doctor who treated 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown for a cut on her forehead in November 2005, six weeks before she died, testified on Thursday at the murder trial of Nixzmary’s stepfather that no other injuries or signs of abuse were found at the time on the girl’s body.The doctor, Michael Abbey-Mensah of Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn, had been called by lawyers for the stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, as part of their effort to convince jurors that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, killed the girl.Jurors in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn have already heard that Ms. Santiago told the police that Nixzmary was injured in late November or early December when she fell on her face after Ms. Santiago pushed her. Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers claimed that was around the time Ms. Santiago began brutalizing Nixzmary because she blamed her for causing a miscarriage.Nixzmary’s battered, emaciated body was found in her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Jan. 11, 2006.Mr. Rodriguez has admitted beating Nixzmary regularly and severely, beginning shortly after Thanksgiving 2005, but his lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, said that it was the girl’s mother who dealt the fatal blow.Dr. Abbey-Mensah, the attending physician in the pediatric emergency department at Woodhull, said that after Mr. Rodriguez brought Nixzmary to the hospital just before midnight on Nov. 29, 2005, triage nurses noted a quarter-inch cut above her right eyebrow, along with slight discoloration and swelling. It required three stitches.“What other observation was made?” Mr. Schwartz asked.“No other bruises present,” Dr. Abbey-Mensah read from the hospital records.
Mr. Schwartz said afterward that the doctor’s testimony and the time frame of the injury fit his theory that Nixzmary’s troubles began only after her mother miscarried, and countered the impression conveyed by prosecutors that she had been chronically abused for months.
“This witness gave us a huge step toward blowing the D.A.’s theory out of the water,” he said.
But it was not clear how helpful the doctor’s testimony would prove to be. In Mr. Rodriguez’s indictment, he was charged with repeatedly beating Nixzmary between Nov. 1, 2005, and the day she died.
And on cross-examination of Dr. Abbey-Mensah, a prosecutor, Linda Weinman, focused on the fact that Mr. Rodriguez appeared to have waited more than 36 hours to take Nixzmary for treatment for a cut that required stitches.
“Is there any indication in the records why Cesar Rodriguez brought her in at midnight on a school night on a weekday for an injury that occurred two days prior?” she asked.
“No,” Dr. Abbey-Mensah replied.
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DEFENDER SAYS FOETUS IN A JAR SHOWS THE FALL OF A MOTHER
Published: February 20, 2008
Correction AppendedAmong the many gruesome discoveries detectives made after they entered the Brooklyn apartment where 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown was found dead more than two years ago was a jar containing a fetus on a dresser in the bedroom of the girl’s parents.On Tuesday, the lawyer defending the girl’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, who is charged with her murder, once again pointed to the jar as evidence that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, was unbalanced, keeping the fetus after a miscarriage she had suffered in November 2005.Ms. Santiago, who is being tried separately, is also charged with murder in her daughter’s death. The central strategy of Mr. Rodriguez’s defense team is to shift focus onto Ms. Santiago.At the same time, the defense also sought to dispel the image of the girl’s life in the apartment as a string of atrocities in a “house of horrors,” as the defense has labeled the prosecution’s portrayal.While not disputing that Nixzmary was beaten savagely in the final days and hours of her life, tied to a chair and made to defecate in a litter box, the defense called Vanessa Rhoden, a former worker for the city’s
Administration for Children’s Services, to show that the home was not as bad as it had been made out to be.A complaint from her school of “bruises and lacerations and welts on Nixzmary” led Ms. Rhoden to visit the apartment on Dec. 1Shortly before that visit, on Nov. 27, 2005, Nixzmary had been taken to the hospital with a black eye and cuts requiring stitches above her eyes.When Ms. Rhoden went to the family’s apartment, she says, she found a home that was “neatly cleaned” with an abundance of food and toys.Nixzmary was “well-groomed and appropriately dressed,” Ms. Rhoden said. She concluded that the children “were not at imminent risk at that time” and that the home “was a safe environment at that time.”
Outside the courtroom, during a recess, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, said he had intended to show the jury that the family had “a somewhat normal home and that it was the mother who snapped.”
After Nixzmary’s death, and reports of multiple missed opportunities to intervene in the girl’s short, sad life, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared, “We, as a city, have failed this child.”
One result was an overhaul of the Administration for Children Services and the firing of over a dozen officials from the agency.
The image Ms. Rhoden painted in court on Tuesday — of a well-ordered apartment with plenty of food in the refrigerator — stood in direct contrast to the condition of Nixzmary’s body at the time of her death.
She was so severely malnourished that she weighed only 36 pounds, according to the medical examiner, some 20 pounds less than an average girl her age should weigh. She had gained only one pound in more than two years, the medical examiner testified.
But the attempt to portray Mr. Rodriguez as a stable provider, in contrast to what the defense has described as his deceitful and mentally unstable wife, was dealt a blow when Ms. Rhoden, the child welfare worker, recounted her conversation with Mr. Rodriguez at the children’s school the morning before she went to the home.
He told her that he had taken Nixzmary to the hospital after the Nov. 27 incident, and then, Ms. Rhoden said, he cursed and said he would not tell her anything else.
Ms. Rhoden said she was concerned by the aborted fetus on display in the bedroom.
In her report to superiors, she testified, she said she had suggested that Ms. Santiago seek treatment.
“I told her it was not healthy to keep that in the house,” Ms. Rhoden said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 21, 2008
An article in some copies on Wednesday about testimony in the murder trial of Cesar Rodriguez, a Brooklyn man accused of killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter, misspelled the given name of the victim. As the article noted in other references, she was
Nixzmary Brown, not Nixmary.
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DEFENDER IN THE CASE OF A SLAIN 7-YEAR-OLD GIRL HAS HIS ADMIRERS: OTHER LAWYERS
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Jeffrey T. Schwartz took on the Cesar Rodriguez murder trial for about a tenth of his usual fee.
Published: February 19, 2008
Returning to his law office the other day after yet another Sisyphean court session, Jeffrey T. Schwartz found a letter that, impressively, contained neither threats nor insults.“It takes tremendous courage to provide truly zealous representation on behalf of a client who has been demonized, vilified and convicted in the press and the public’s mind before he has even been indicted,” read the letter, from Edward Donlon, also a defense lawyer. For every anonymous attacker, Mr. Donlon wrote, “there are 10 of us who are covering your back and are inspired by the job you are doing.”Inspiring might not be how many people would describe Mr. Schwartz’s advocacy for the man accused of killing 7-year-old
Nixzmary Brown, which has, so far, included calling Nixzmary a “little Houdini”; speaking up for the nutritional value of cat food; joking about his own prodigious consumption of yogurt, the snack that the emaciated girl was said to have stolen from the refrigerator shortly before she died; and asking for a mistrial about once a week.Whatever it takes to acquit Nixzmary’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, of one of the more notorious child murders in the city’s recent history, Mr. Schwartz says he is morally and professionally obligated to try it, if it is legal. In Mr. Schwartz’s ethical universe, the decision to represent Mr. Rodriguez has the air of a sacred mission.“I did this because it was the right thing to do,” he said as he sat in a spacious red-curtained office on Lower Broadway filled with the expected framed newspaper clippings, plus an assortment of antique weapons: guns, knives, Balinese bows, hand grenades.“Throughout the course of my career, I thought that I would never take this type of case — child abuse or child murder. But I started questioning that about myself. You can’t call yourself a true criminal defense lawyer if you start handpicking the types of cases that you take.”The state panel that assigns counsel for indigent defendants reached out to many lawyers when Mr. Rodriguez was arrested in January 2006. Mr. Schwartz, the panel said, was the first to raise his hand. (He is making $75 an hour on this case, about one-tenth his fee for private clients.)Mr. Schwartz, 45, a tall, boyish Brooklyn native who makes no bones about his love of the limelight, became a defense lawyer in 1993 after graduating from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at
Yeshiva University and paying his dues in the homicide bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office.He has done a few trials that were covered in the press, and in 2006, he was one of the half-dozen lawyers vying to represent Darryl Littlejohn, the bouncer accused of murdering a college student named Imette St. Guillen.But the Cesar Rodriguez trial, now grinding into its sixth week in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, seems like the challenge of a lifetime.
Mr. Rodriguez — who has taken responsibility for tying Nixzmary to a chair with duct tape and twine and bungee cord, pounding her with his hands, throwing her to the ground and covering her tiny body with dozens of bruises — is not just charged with delivering the blow that killed Nixzmary. He is also charged with helping Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, kill the girl (Ms. Santiago will be tried later). So Mr. Schwartz must plant in the jury’s mind a reasonable doubt that Mr. Rodriguez even intentionally contributed to the circumstances that caused Nixzmary’s death.
It looks like a job for some sort of legal Superman, and to show that he fits the bill, Mr. Schwartz proudly displays on his office wall a blue-and-red T-shirt with a big S on it, a gift from a grateful client. Beneath the S appear the words “Super” and “man,” the latter preceded by a synonym for cattle dung.
So what does a Superman of sorts do? He works: Mr. Schwartz, who is divorced and has an 18-year-old daughter, claims to rise in his Manhattan apartment each morning before 3 a.m. and work straight through till night.
He leaves no stone unturned in the search for helpful witnesses. A retired medical examiner has been attending the Rodriguez trial. Mr. Schwartz struck up a conversation with him in the men’s room. Now, Mr. Schwartz says, the doctor will testify about inconsistencies in the prosecution’s medical evidence.
And he neither pulls punches nor apologizes. The Houdini remark, a reference to Nixzmary’s ability to slip the bonds that held her to the chair, was, Mr. Schwartz said, intended as a homage — Houdini “was a hero and was a celebrity for his ability to escape” — and to give the jury some sense of the challenges facing Mr. Rodriguez, an unemployed security guard, as he tried to maintain order in a chaotic household.
Mr. Schwartz’s withering cross-examination of the family’s upstairs neighbor, a mild woman whom prosecutors say Nixzmary’s family went to for help after the girl had already been dead for hours, was necessary, he said, because “she started straying from testimony she’d given five times before in an attempt to make my client look worse.”
As for Mr. Rodriguez himself, Mr. Schwartz called him “one of the best clients I ever had.” He has been, Mr. Schwartz said, “a total gentleman. He apologized to me when he found out I was getting nasty phone calls.”
Mr. Schwartz has also spent many hours sparring with his counterpart, the lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh.
Two weeks ago, when prosecutors trotted out a pink Tinkerbell backpack, found in the family’s apartment, that had not been on the list of their planned exhibits, Mr. Schwartz complained to the judge, L. Priscilla Hall, that he was being sandbagged.
Ms. Dwimoh, as if on cue, picked up a folder from her table. “If he wants to talk about sandbag, the papers that I have here,” she said, are “just pornography that was found all through the apartment.”
“Judge,” Mr. Schwartz shot back, “when I last checked, pornography is not a crime. Maybe the D.A. has some in her apartment.”
His attempt to clear the courtroom air of prosecutorial sanctimony earned him a quick wrist-slap from Justice Hall. “Counsel,” she thundered, “you are out of order.”
Ms. Dwimoh declined when asked to comment on how she found Mr. Schwartz as an adversary. Last week, the prosecution rested and Mr. Schwartz began presenting his case. In the days to come, he promises a strong cast of mostly hostile witnesses — police officers, child welfare officials and the like — who he says will paint a pattern of sloppy investigative work.
“We want to present a full and fair and accurate picture to the jury,” Mr. Schwartz said. “That’s all we’re trying to do.”
Off-color T-shirts aside, “I truly believe in truth, justice and the American way,” Mr. Schwartz said.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.*************************************************************************************************
UPDATES: 2/18/2008
DEFENSE OPENS ITS CASE IN BEATING DEATH OF GIRL
Published: February 16, 2008
Cesar Rodriguez has admitted brutalizing his 7-year-old stepdaughter,
Nixzmary Brown — beating her with his hands and a belt, plunging her head into cold water, lashing her to a wooden chair to discipline her, and finally leaving her, naked and starving, on a cold floor.
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
The defense’s first witness, Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky.
But as his defense team began to present its case to a jury in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Friday, it sought to raise doubts about whether he was the one who delivered the blow that killed the girl and suggested that investigators had not paid enough attention to the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago.
Saying the prosecution resulted from a “one-sided, lopsided investigation,” Mr. Rodriguez’s chief lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, told reporters after Friday’s court session that he would keep hammering away at that theme.
“I am calling this terrible police work,” he said.
Still, nothing presented in court Friday contradicted the central thrust of the prosecution’s case. Instead, the defense used its opening witness — the only one called Friday — to try to raise questions about why investigators did not try to prepare a full DNA profile for Ms. Santiago although they did for Mr. Rodriguez.
Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, of the Department of Sciences at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted that two items analyzed by police experts — a pair of green sweat pants and duct tape — showed traces of female DNA.
“Without the profile of Ms. Santiago,” those traces were not useful, he told the jury.
Dr. Kobilinsky acknowledged on cross-examination that there was not enough DNA evidence on those two items to match an individual profile even if one had been available.
Later, the prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, told reporters that a DNA profile of Ms. Santiago had not been prepared because there were not enough traces of DNA on any of the items to allow a match.
Dr. Kobilinsky’s testimony, she said, did nothing to undermine the case against Mr. Rodriguez.
“Nixzmary died a slow death,” she said. “And the people she called Mommy and Daddy failed to get her prompt medical attention.”
In the courtroom, the prosecution sought to turn Dr. Kobilinsky’s testimony to its advantage, using his reference to the “passive transfer” of DNA to once again go through the catalog of evidence of Nixzmary’s dismal life and death.
The chair she was tied to with a nylon rope was hauled onto a table in front of the largely female jury, and Dr. Kobilinsky was asked if there could have been “passive transfer” of DNA to the ropes that bound her ankles.
There could have been, the witness said.
“Would it be fair to say that if someone were thrown up against the wall, their blood would end up there?” a prosecutor asked, pointing to a photo of a blood-spattered wall.
A pillow with blood stains was another example of “passive transfer,” Dr. Kobilinsky acknowledged. Same for the blood on duct tape that bound Nixzmary and the blood on the belt she was beaten with.
Finally, there was the litter box that the girl was forced to use as a toilet, the prosecution’s last example of passive transfer of DNA.
Mr. Schwartz said afterward that the defense was not likely to call character witnesses for Mr. Rodriguez but would keep raising questions about the investigation and the failure to focus on Ms. Santiago.
Ms. Santiago has also been charged with murder in her daughter’s death and is to go on trial later.
The prosecution maintains that the two acted in concert in the girl’s death.
Earlier this month, after Ms. Santiago invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, the judge ruled that she could not be compelled to testify at her husband’s trial.
Nevertheless, although she has been absent from the courtroom physically, Nixzmary’s mother has been a constant presence, invoked often by the defense and Mr. Rodriguez’s main hope in deflecting blame.
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GIRL’S MOTHER WON’T TESTIFY AT TRIAL OF STEPFATHER
Published: February 12, 2008
Nixzaliz Santiago, the mother of
Nixzmary Brown, will not have to testify in the murder trial of her husband, Cesar Rodriguez, a judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, has built his defense around a claim that though Mr. Rodriguez admits beating 7-year-old Nixzmary repeatedly, it was Ms. Santiago who dealt the fatal blow in January 2006. Nixzmary, Mr. Rodriguez’s stepdaughter, died after weeks or months of being abused and deprived of adequate food. To bolster his defense, Mr. Schwartz had sought to compel Ms. Santiago to testify.But when he asked some of his proposed questions at a brief, tense hearing on Monday in State Supreme Court, without the jury present, Ms. Santiago again and again invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.“When did you come to this country?” Mr. Schwartz asked Ms. Santiago, 29, who was actually born in Puerto Rico.“I take the Fifth,” she said through a Spanish interpreter.Mr. Schwartz asked what was the last school grade she had completed.“The Fifth,” Ms. Santiago replied.“The fifth grade?” Mr. Schwartz asked.“No, I take the Fifth,” she said.Mr. Schwartz ran through his list of questions. Were Ms. Santiago’s parents legally married? How old was she when she first got pregnant? How much time has she spent in the work force?The Fifth, Ms. Santiago replied each time.One of Ms. Santiago’s lawyers, Sammy Sanchez, said in court before the hearing that because Mr. Schwartz was trying to blame her for the murder, there was little his client could safely say on the stand.
Ms. Santiago’s lawyers were also concerned that if prosecutors cross-examined her, they might elicit information that could be used at her own murder trial.
At the hearing, the judge, L. Priscilla Hall, listened for a few minutes to the defense lawyer’s one-sided examination of the reluctant witness before calling a halt.
Because Ms. Santiago would not answer Mr. Schwartz’s questions, Justice Hall said, there was no legitimate reason for her to testify. “I could not be sure,” Justice Hall said, “that questions posed, even though seemingly innocuous, would not open the witness to incriminating herself.”
The hearing afforded Ms. Santiago and Mr. Rodriguez one of their occasional opportunities to see each other.
When Ms. Santiago entered the courtroom, she looked in Mr. Rodriguez’s direction, but he was blocked by his lawyers. When she was on the stand, Mr. Rodriguez looked up at her once or twice but mostly looked down. Ms. Santiago did not look his way again.
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ABUSED GIRL WAS DEAD FOR SEVEN HOURS, DOCTOR TESTIFIES
By ANDY NEWMAN and ANNIE CORREAL
Published: February 8, 2008
Seven-year-old
Nixzmary Brown slipped into unconsciousness more than 13 hours before her stepfather and mother sought medical help for her, a medical examiner testified Thursday at her stepfather’s murder trial.For more than seven hours of that time, the doctor said, Nixzmary was dead.The timeline offered in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn by the medical examiner, Dr. Barbara A. Sampson, contrasts with the accounts that the stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, gave the authorities on Jan. 11, 2006, the day that Nixzmary’s body was found in her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.In his written and videotaped statements, Mr. Rodriguez described an evening of shopping at Target on Jan. 10, followed by snacks for Nixzmary’s five siblings, a confrontation with Nixzmary over a container of yogurt or pudding that had disappeared, and another confrontation over a computer printer that Nixzmary confessed to jamming. This was followed, Mr. Rodriguez said, by a punishment session in which he beat Nixzmary, then held her head under a running tub faucet. When he left her naked on a bedroom floor, she was awake and moaning, he said.According to Dr. Sampson, the city’s first chief deputy medical examiner, who presented the results of Nixzmary’s autopsy on Thursday, none of that could have happened when Mr. Rodriguez said it did.Nixzmary, Dr. Sampson said, lost consciousness around 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, from a blow to the right side of her head sustained two days earlier.“At least several hours before her death she was not receiving oxygen,” Dr. Sampson said, describing a microscopic exam of the girl’s brain cells.“She was unconscious at least several hours before she ultimately died,” she said. Nixzmary died between 8 and 9 p.m., Dr. Sampson said.This would make Mr. Rodriguez’s efforts to resuscitate Nixzmary — which he said he began briefly before sending his wife to summon help around 4 a.m. on Jan. 11 and was still doing when paramedics arrived — pointless, said Ama Dwimoh, the lead prosecutor.“Cesar Rodriguez was doing C.P.R. on a dead body,” she said.Dr. Sampson said the blow inflicted Jan. 8 caused a subdural hematoma, or bleeding on and around Nixzmary’s brain.She described the symptoms of a slow death by subdural hematoma: “headache, nausea, confusion,” after which the victim grows “sleepy, somnolent and gradually slips into a coma, followed by respiratory depression.”
Typically, without medical attention, Dr. Sampson said, “respiration would be so depressed that she would die.”
Dr. Sampson said that Nixzmary, who weighed 36 pounds when she died, was killed both by the blow and by a history of starvation and abuse.
“The cause of death was child abuse syndrome, including blunt impact to the head with subdural hematoma,” she said. Child abuse syndrome, she explained, is a clinical term for prolonged physical abuse, malnutrition and neglect. “That subdural hematoma is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, contends that Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, dealt the fatal blow while Mr. Rodriguez slept on the night of Jan. 10-11. Ms. Santiago is also charged with murder and will be tried after Mr. Rodriguez.
Dr. Sampson also said that Nixzmary’s two black eyes — huge raccoonlike circles surrounding the whole eye socket, photographs of which were shown to a tearful jury again on Thursday — were inflicted in the last few days of her life. Mr. Schwartz, noting that Ms. Santiago told investigators that Nixzmary sustained at least one black eye in late November when she fell after Ms. Santiago pushed her, has said that the black eyes shown in the photograph long predated Nixzmary’s death.
Dr. Sampson disputed that contention. “Black eyes that occurred six weeks ago would be gone,” she said.
In his videotaped statement, Mr. Rodriguez says of the black eyes, “she managed to do that to herself.”
Mr. Schwartz told reporters outside the courtroom that Dr. Sampson’s version of events was not just at odds with the accounts of Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago, but also at variance with the impression that the prosecution had elicited from its own witnesses as it presented its case. That testimony, based in part on Mr. Rodriguez’s statements, seemed not to question at least Mr. Rodriguez’s contention that Nixzmary was alive and well enough to misbehave on the night of Jan. 10.
“The pathologist’s testimony is disproving the people’s theory that this happened on January 10-11,” Mr. Schwartz said. “The whole setup has been shown by their own witness to be false.”
In her opening statement, though, Ms. Dwimoh was vague about the timeline, saying that the shopping trip to Target occurred on Jan. 9; that “hours later,” Mr. Rodriguez beat Nixzmary; and that after that, “hours later,” in the early hours of Jan. 11, her parents finally sought help.
Surveillance video from the Target store near Downtown Brooklyn, played earlier in the trial, shows Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Santiago and five of the six children — all except Nixzmary — at the store at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 9.
Outside court on Thursday, Ms. Dwimoh was asked if that meant that while the family was out shopping, Nixzmary was at home slowly dying from the brain injury she had suffered the day before.
“It sure seems that way from the evidence,” Ms. Dwimoh said.
Mr. Schwartz began his cross-examination of Dr. Sampson on Thursday by seeking, without success, to elicit the opinion that Nixzmary, who weighed only as much as a normal 4-year-old, was not dangerously underweight. His cross-examination is to continue on Friday.
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DEFENSE IN GIRL’S BEATING DEATH FOCUSES ON MOTHER’S ROLE
Published: February 6, 2008
Three times now, the photographs of
Nixzmary Brown’s body have brought jurors to tears.Handed around the jury box, displayed several times life-size on a screen, held up to a camera during the videotaped statement that Nixzmary’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, made to prosecutors hours after her death in January 2006, the photos add up to a mountain of evidence. They show a rail-thin 7-year-old covered with bruises, cuts and scabs — in every shade of red and purple and brown and black — from her head to her ankles.Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, has spent the last two days chipping away at the mountain.When he gets done, he hopes to convince the jury in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn that though Mr. Rodriguez has admitted administering daily beatings to Nixzmary, though he admitted throwing her to the floor and pounding her with his hands on the night she died, there is a reasonable doubt that he caused or intentionally contributed to her death.So on Monday and Tuesday, in the third week of Mr. Rodriguez’s trial for second-degree murder, Mr. Schwartz pressed the police detective who presented Mr. Rodriguez’s videotaped statement to concede that many of Nixzmary’s most serious wounds were inflicted by the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago.“Isn’t it a fact,” Mr. Schwartz asked the detective, Steven Sneider, on Monday, “that Cesar Rodriguez was taking credit for all the injuries Nixzaliz Santiago inflicted?”Detective Sneider never quite answered the question — Mr. Schwartz’s questions of him have drawn a torrent of objections from the prosecutors — but by Tuesday afternoon he granted that it was Ms. Santiago who admitted giving Nixzmary two black eyes around Thanksgiving 2005, six weeks before she died.The stitched cut above Nixzmary’s eye and the gash on her chin remained of murkier authorship. Over the course of the trial, they have been variously attributed to Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Santiago, a piece of wood that Nixzmary slipped and fell on and a fan she bumped into.As for the fat purple lump on the base of Nixzmary’s skull — evidence of what the medical examiner found to be the blunt-force trauma that killed Nixzmary along with a more chronic condition called “child abuse syndrome” — no one has taken credit for it.“That bruise, I don’t know where it came from,” Mr. Rodriguez says on the video.Mr. Schwartz has a considerable task before him. Even if the jurors decide that Ms. Santiago delivered the fatal blow to Nixzmary, as Mr. Schwartz says he intends to prove, they could still convict Mr. Rodriguez if they find that he acted in concert with Ms. Santiago in committing the murder.The lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, told reporters outside the courtroom: “It really doesn’t matter who did what. What matters is they acted together, with the same actions, the same knowledge and unfortunately, the same result.”Ms. Santiago, who will be tried after Mr. Rodriguez, is also charged with second-degree murder.Mr. Schwartz has also taken pains to point out to the jury that Mr. Rodriguez does not himself lay any blame on Ms. Santiago.Would it be fair to say, Mr. Schwartz asked Detective Sneider about Mr. Rodriguez’s videotaped statement, that “never did he indicate that his wife, Nixzaliz Santiago, had raised or lifted even one finger to Nixzmary Brown?”“Yes,” the detective replied.In one of Mr. Rodriguez’s handwritten statements that Detective Sneider read to the jury, Mr. Rodriguez wrote that he was responsible for disciplining the children with an “iron hand.” In Mr. Schwartz’s formulation, this is all evidence of Mr. Rodriguez’s innocence. He has told jurors that Mr. Rodriguez was so deftly manipulated by his wife that he agreed to take responsibility for Nixzmary’s death.
As for Ms. Santiago, Mr. Rodriguez’s jury may yet hear from her. Mr. Schwartz said Tuesday that he planned to call her as his first witness, though what, if anything, she might testify to, given her right to refuse to incriminate herself, was expected to be the subject of legal wrangling in the days to come.
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NIXZMARY BROWN: A TIMELINE OF A CHILD MURDER TRIAL
February 6, 2008
By ANDY NEWMAN
The day that Cesar Rodriguez was charged in the beating death of his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown, he was questioned by a series of police officers and prosecutors.
February 1, 2008
By ANNIE CORREAL
The jury in the trial of a Brooklyn man charged with killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter watched a surveillance video on Wednesday that prosecutors are hinting is crucial to their case.
January 31, 2008
By ANNIE CORREAL
Blood found throughout the apartment of Nixzmary Brown and under the fingernails of the man accused of killing her belonged to the girl, a representative of the chief medical examiner’s office testified.
January 30, 2008
By CLYDE HABERMAN
The testimony in the case of Cesar Rodriguez, charged with the murder of his 7-year-old stepdaughter, was suspended while the judge conferred behind closed doors with all the lawyers.
January 29, 2008
By ANNIE CORREAL
To bolster his case that a man accused of killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter is not guilty, the defense lawyer showed the jury on Tuesday a photo of a mug with the words “World’s Greatest Dad” — the girl’s gift to the defendant, he said.
January 23, 2008
By ANDY NEWMAN and LESLIE KAUFMAN
A man accused of killing his stepdaughter has admitted he routinely beat her, drawing attention to the vague nature of New York State law dealing with corporal punishment.
January 20, 2008
By ANNIE CORREAL; ANDY NEWMAN CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.
A lawyer for a Brooklyn man charged with killing his stepdaughter submitted photographs of a fetus in a jar to show that the girl’s mother, driven mad by a miscarriage, was responsible for her death.
January 19, 2008
By ANDY NEWMAN
Prosecutors in the Nixzmary Brown trial showed jurors items that were found in the room where the child died, entering them into evidence.
January 18, 2008
By ANDY NEWMAN
In the trial of the man accused of murdering Nixzmary Brown, the defense lawyer portrayed the girl as someone who terrorized her siblings and refused to be disciplined.
January 17, 2008
By ANDY NEWMAN
While seating the jury in the Nixzmary Brown killing, the prosecutor posed questions on the disciplining of children.
January 12, 2008
By MICHAEL BRICK
Two newspaper reporters described by prosecutors as critical to a murder case against the parents of the 7-year-old victim cannot be compelled to testify, a judge ruled yesterday.
September 13, 2007
By MICHAEL BRICK
Now prosecutors are seeking to compel two reporters to testify about interviews with 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown’s parents, who are charged with murdering her.
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RELATED ARTICLES:
August 28, 2007
By RAY RIVERA
A report says that in some cases, the city’s child welfare agency received warnings that children were in danger but never fully acted on that information.
August 10, 2007
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
A mother of six, whose live-in boyfriend was charged with fatally beating her 4-year-old son, agreed to the sentence of up to seven and a half years.
July 19, 2007
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(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
thank you so much for all of this. this breaks my heart, I sat and cried while reading it all.
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i have been keeping up on this case since the day it broke. everytime i get in the bath i think of this little girl. i am glad its over and i am upset of the out come. i have a seven year old daughter and i couldn’t even think of it or allow it to happen. she is in a better place and will always be in my heart!!!!!!!!!!!!! godbless the ones who have endor child abuse. you will be forever in my heart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1