A monster of a dad turned ordinary household items into implements of torture and used them to make his 7-year- old stepdaughter’s short life hell, Brooklyn prosecutors charged yesterday.
They entered the items into evidence at the murder trial of Cesar Rodriguez, who is charged with beating stepdaughter Nixzmary Brown to death.
Shocked jurors and spectators watched in horror as a prosecutor and a police officer slowly cut open large brown bags of evidence, beginning with the child-sized wood-and-metal chair to which the girl reportedly was routinely bound by Rodriguez.
Strands of white nylon cord still hung from the classroom-like chair.
Then came the bungee cord and duct tape Rodriguez allegedly used to cinch the girl’s ankles to the chair. And the doorknob he tied shut to imprison Nixzmary in a bare room known as the “dirty room,” authorities say.
Jurors appeared most disturbed when they saw the gray, 3-by-2-foot cat-litter box, which the abused child allegedly was forced to use as her toilet during the days she was exiled in the room.
There were also 13 small manila envelopes containing fecal samples from the litter box. Prosecutors promised that DNA evidence still to come would show that the waste was not from a cat.
“I think you could character ize today as a very sad day,” said prosecutor Ama Dwimoh. “It was a somber moment . . . That’s all we know about Nixzmary Brown, is what we put into evidence.”
Jurors also saw the tiny red sweatpants the girl had on when police found her, as well as two stained, grungy shirts she’d worn that night, a girl’s belt and a Donald Duck pillow, stained with what appeared to be blood.
Even Rodriguez’s lawyer, Jeffrey Schwartz, conceded that the evidence was troubling.
“They are hard things to look at, because we know what they were used for,” he told reporters.
Rodriguez faces life in prison if convicted of killing Nixzmary on Jan. 11, 2006. Schwartz admits that his client roughly disciplined the girl, but claims it was the mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who delivered the fatal blow.
The parade of nauseating physical evidence followed a contentious morning during which two witnesses reported seeing Rodriguez attempt half-hearted CPR on the already-dead child.
“The only one that was doing CPR to that child and trying to save her life was Cesar Rodriguez, si or no?” Schwartz asked of neighbor Ulbis Rivera, mixing Spanish and English.
“If you want to call that CPR, OK,” Rivera shot back.
And the first officer on the scene, Erick Nolan, said he, too, wasn’t impressed with Rodriguez’s first-aid ministrations.
“There was no effort to the chest compressions, in my opinion,” said Nolan.
An enraged Schwartz accused the officer of embellishing, noting the cop never mentioned the meager effort during testimony at a pre-trial hearing.
The lawyer baited the officer, who kept his temper in check, at one point accidentally addressing him as “detective.”
“I’m not a detective,” Nolan said.
“Well, I’m not surprised,” Schwartz replied.
Nolan said he himself never bothered to perform CPR because he knew within seconds that the girl was dead.
“She had black eyes,” he said. “Both eyes were black, and bruises all over her body. She had a deep gash on her chin and a ligature wound on her leg. She was very thin, emaciated.”