Bird murder defendant: 'What about my feelings?'
Leonardo Valdez-Cruz, seen arriving at the Nassau County Courthouse on the first day of his trial, was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges on April 30 in the torture and stabbing of his estranged girlfriend, Jo'Anna Bird, 24, in her New Cassel apartment in 2009. (April 13, 2010) Credit: Howard Schnapp
Horrific photos of Jo'Anna Bird's beaten and cut body flicked across a screen yesterday in a Mineola courtroom as a prosecutor told a Nassau jury how Leonardo Valdez-Cruz tortured and then killed his estranged girlfriend.
As a photo of a bloodied window frame appeared, a man's voice broke the quiet.
"Those weren't my fingerprints. What about that?" shouted the defendant, who prosecutors say left the bloody smears on March 19, 2009, when he fled Bird's New Cassel apartment after stabbing her to death.
"I loved Jo'Anna," said Valdez-Cruz, who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. "What about my feelings?"
At that, Nassau County Judge John Kase took the unusual step of dismissing the jury for lunch just minutes before prosecutor Madeline Singas was to complete her closing argument in the trial of Valdez-Cruz, 24, of Westbury.
The jury later heard the remainder of Singas' closing argument and the judge's explanation of the law, then deliberated for about an hour before breaking for the day.
Jurors are set to continue deliberations Friday at 9:30 a.m.
After Cruz's outburst, Kase initially ordered that Valdez-Cruz be kept outside the courtroom for the remainder of the trial and only allowed to watch the proceedings on a television.
But after Valdez-Cruz's lawyer, Dana Grossblatt of Jericho, told Kase that Valdez-Cruz promised to remain quiet when the proceedings continued, Kase relented.
In her closing argument, Singas showed Bird's autopsy photos while playing audiotapes of Valdez-Cruz speaking to Bird from jail in the fall of 2008. In the recordings, Cruz threatens to "torture" Bird if she won't take him back. He says he will make her eyes "pop out" and force her to "sit up" while he kills her.
While she played the recordings, Singas showed autopsy photos of stab wounds to Bird's eyes and crime scene photos of the staircase where, prosecutors say, Bird was indeed forced to sit up while she was beaten and stabbed in the face and throat.
"These are specific, pointed threats about what he would do to her that he ultimately did to her," Singas said.
In the courtroom gallery, Valdez-Cruz's sisters wept audibly, and Bird's mother, Sharon Dorsett, who had not seen the photos before, laid her head on her daughter Melissa's shoulder before finally bursting from the courtroom in tears.
Dorsett did not return to court after the lunch break, and family members said she went to the hospital with elevated blood pressure.
Grossblatt, in her closing argument, said that the fact that Valdez-Cruz and Bird, who have a son together, had a tumultuous relationship is not evidence that he killed her. She said police decided early on that Valdez-Cruz was the killer and they never investigated other leads.
"You read these letters," she said, referring to threatening letters Valdez-Cruz wrote Bird from jail. "You heard these horrible phone calls. But words are not actions."
