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Stepdad: Young Nixzmary gave herself black eyes

BY ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO | anthony.destefano@newsday.com

9:07 PM EST, January 31, 2008

Little 36-pound Nixzmary Brown caused the two massive black eyes she had when police found her body, according to the stepfather accused of murdering her.

"She did that to herself," Cesar Rodriguez said in a videotaped statement he gave to police on Jan. 11, 2006, after investigators showed him pictures of the child's battered body on a morgue table.

When Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Linda Weinman asked during the interview how Nixzmary, 7, injured herself so severely to cause the black eyes, Rodriguez said only, "I don't know."

An edited version of the video was played in Brooklyn State Supreme Court during Rodriguez's second-degree murder trial Thursday. The jury wasn't present because defense attorneys wanted to see if further redactions had to be made. The jury is expected to see the video Friday and also view a written statement Rodriguez gave to police, in which he admitted beating his daughter.

In the video, Rodriguez, 29, talked in a flat emotionless voice as Weinman questioned him about the way he treated his stepdaughter in the weeks before she died in the family's Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.

"How did she get all these marks?," Weinman asked Rodriguez after showing him a photo of bruises on Nixzmary's body.

"That is from me beating her with a belt," Rodriguez replied.

Prosecutors have charged that Rodriguez and his wife Nixzaliz Santiago, Nixzmary's mother, beat and underfed the child in the weeks leading to her death. Rodriguez admitted he tied her to a chair, sometimes with bungee cord. Investigators belief an injury to Nixzmary's skull was caused by Rodriguez hitting her head on a bathtub spigot while he was trying to douse her with cold water.

Rodriguez said in the video, which had been first seen in court during a pretrial hearing in late 2006, that Nixzmary was an incorrigible child who beat her five brothers and sisters. Rodriguez claimed he fed Nixzmary but could not explain when asked why she weighed only 36 pounds at death. He also didn't know if she ate cat food.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Schwartz objected to the question about cat food, but Brooklyn State Supreme Court Judge Priscilla Hall is keeping the remark in the edited tape.

"I believe it is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence we have because it comes from his mouth," prosecutor Ama Dwimoh said outside court about the tape.

But Schwartz said the tape wasn't a voluntary confession but a coerced one, with Weinman trying to "badger" his client.

"He was covering for his wife," said Schwartz, referring to Santiago, 29, who is set to stand trial later this year.