Oct 15, 2008 9:03 am US/Eastern
Jury To Begin Deliberating Fate Of Nixzmary's Mom
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Nixzaliz Santiago is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in the death of Nixzmary Brown, pictured here.
AP
Justice has already been served against the stepfather of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, the young girl who suffered a torturous death inside her Brooklyn apartment. Now the fate of her mother, who is also on trial, will soon be known as the jury is set to begin deliberations Tuesday night.
It is hard to convey the passion and the intensity with which Kathleen Mulllin is fighting on behalf of her client, Nixzaliz Santiago. The attorney is trying to convince a jury that Santiago, who was present in the apartment when her daughter was killed, somehow is innocent, unlike her husband Cesar Rodriguez.
"She didn't understand the circumstances of what had happened to Nixzmary when Cesar took her into that back room and duct taped her and beat her so she didn't know. She couldn't know, and before she figured it out Nixzmary was dead," said a much more subdued Mullin after the proceedings.
Inside the courtroom, though, she was practically yelling, pacing, coming to within a foot of the jury. She blamed Nixzmary's death squarely on Rodriguez who had already been found guilty in an earlier trial for manslaughter.
Watching in court Tuesday was Nixzaliz's mother, Maria Gonzalez. Her presence could help her daughter, but the jury might remember the video of the mother's confession and how she seemed to show only brief remorse over her daughter's death.
Still, Mullin says her client never grasped the situation of what really happened to her daughter.
"He took her from that bathroom; and he beat her in that back bedroom, away from Mrs. Santiago. She never knew, or never understood what happened to her daughter," she said.
But the District Attorney is countering that argument with a simple one of her own: a little girl is dead and that mother simply did nothing about it.
The evidence in the case included grim crime scene photos from the room where Nixzmary was bound to a chair, starved and forced to urinate in a litter box.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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