Andrea Sneiderman, who is accused of conspiring to kill her husband, Rusty, has been silent except for a contentious day on the witness stand earlier this year.
But her friends and supporters, including some longtime friends of her late husband, are now stepping forward to wage a campaign to help resurrect her tattered public image — especially since the trial will almost certainly be held in DeKalb County.
“There needs to be an ongoing opportunity to get the word out,” said Elizabeth Stansbury, a DeKalb resident who befriended Andrea Sneiderman in the days after the murder. “There’s a jury pool situation. This is going to be here. We want to show an opposing view.”
Her supporters, most of whom are well-to-do and highly educated, and have largely declined interviews until recently, say the public portrait of Sneiderman as a cold, calculating “black widow” is inconsistent with the smart, kind, vulnerable woman they know.
Several of them sat through parts or even all of the trial of Hemy Neuman, Andrea’s boss who was found guilty but mentally ill in March of shooting Rusty to death outside a day care center in upscale Dunwoody in November 2010. They heard the evidence and testimony that led prosecutors to later indict Andrea, alleging she had an affair with Neuman and conspired to have him kill her husband.
Still, those friends believe Andrea’s contentions that she had no affair and had nothing to do with the killing.
“If I thought she had anything to do with the situation, I’d be first in line calling for her to be held accountable,” said Jeffrey Moss, who became friends with Rusty in the dorms at Indiana University two decades ago. Moss, who sat behind Andrea in support during the Neuman trial, said Andrea visited his home in Chicago with her children not long before her arrest this summer.
“I was trying to convince her to move to Chicago, but she doesn’t want to give up. Her kids have friends in Atlanta,” said Moss, adding that she didn’t talk about the long-rumored possibility she would be arrested. “I don’t think she was particularly worried. She was focused on moving forward.”
Moss, who testified at Andrea’s bond hearing in August, noted that many of Rusty’s close friends have sided with the accused widow. “The easiest thing to do would be to blame Andrea,” he said. “We’re taking a much harder road.”
One such friend, Matt Davidson, grew up with Rusty near Cleveland and was his college roommate. “We called each other our first wives,” Davidson said, laughing.
He remembers when Rusty met Andrea at the Jewish student center in college. “Andrea was the typical, nice Jewish girl from the suburbs — smart, ambitious, had goals,” said Davidson, who was a groomsman at Rusty and Andrea’s marriage. “It was clear to everyone they were destined to be together.”
She visited Davidson and his family in California after the murder.
“She was a grieving widow at that point, still in a state of shock,” he said. Friends of Rusty’s family say his parents are disappointed that Davidson and some of Rusty’s other longtime friends support Andrea.
“It’s a terrible place to be in. I don’t want to be between these families,” Davidson said. “His parents were like another set of parents growing up.”
Davidson said some friendships have become strained as people pick sides.
“Some are just laying low or are trying to remain neutral,” he said. “One is active on the other side, our college roommate.”
Davidson was referring to Josh Golub, now a Cleveland radiologist who lives near Rusty’s parents, Don and Marilyn Sneiderman, and sees them frequently.
Golub saw Davidson and his wife at their 20th class reunion in August. They remained pleasant but distant and did not talk about Rusty.
The divide would have upset Rusty, always the peacemaker, his friends say.
“There’s been a lot of angry emails that have gone back and forth between friends,” Golub said. “Rusty would be so upset that his friends were fighting. He was always one to avoid trouble. He’d be trying to find a way around this.”
“The truth of the matter is no one, including Andrea’s friends, know what happened except Andrea and Hemy,” said Golub’s wife, Leah.
Another of Rusty’s friends who has split with Andrea is Dan Sorin, an engineering professor at Duke University who met Rusty in first grade. Sorin visited Andrea a few weeks after the shooting.
The experience was “the most wrenching three of four hours of my life,” Sorin said. Andrea was too distraught to eat, repeatedly asking, “who could’ve done this?”
“In retrospect, it was pretty creepy being in that house,” he added. “Now I know she knew what had happened.”
Sorin started having doubts about his friend’s story when he heard of her riff with Rusty’s parents.
“Knowing (Andrea) had cut Don and Marilyn out of her life, the way she was oddly confrontational with them, it was just heartbreaking to me,” Sorin said. “At that point, things got pretty suspicious to me.”
“I’m an engineer. I come at things logically,” he said. “I’ve run out of situations where she’s not culpable. I’d rather not believe it.”
Of those friends who’ve remained loyal to Andrea, Sorin said, “If you’re not suspicious, you’re not awake.”
During the trial, evidence indicated that Andrea and Neuman shared more than 1,000 texts and phone calls, had traveled together and had danced together during one trip.
Perhaps most damaging was when Sneiderman told jurors she did not know her husband had been shot until she arrived at Atlanta Medical Center, where his body lay. But Rusty’s father and a good friend of Andrea later testified that she called them from her car, before she ever made it to the hospital, telling them her husband had been shot.
Andrea Sneiderman’s supporters say she frequently sent scores of text messages and was under pressure from her boss, Neuman, who was infatuated with her. They say she was afraid to complain about him, worried she’d get fired.
Supporters have varying reasons for the testimony about when she learned about her husband’s fate: that she was not sure of the prosecutor’s question or that her friend who testified for the prosecution, Shayna Citron, had been coached by prosecutors.
Sneiderman was released on bond and now lives with her children — ages 7 and 4 — at the Johns Creek home of her parents, Herb and Bonita Greenberg. Several of her supporters have been banned from visiting her because they are potential witnesses.
Last month, prosecutors and a lawyer representing Rusty’s family in a civil suit circulated a new theory of why Rusty was killed — that she manipulated Neuman into killing her husband so she could be with another paramour, a man named Joesph Dell.
Dell, who separated from his pregnant wife after the murder, visited Andrea in jail and received 58 calls from Andrea during her three-week incarceration, according to court documents. The two knew they were being recorded “but still repeatedly mock(ed) the prosecution in a vulgar fashion (to the amusement of the defendant),” the Sneiderman family suit said.
Dell would not comment, but Sneiderman’s friend Stansbury said Dell is a close friend and supporter of Andrea. Stansbury, who was at the Andrea’s parents lake house when a SWAT team arrested her, said Dell never lived with the Greenbergs, as alluded to in Sneiderman’s family suit against Andrea.
Stansbury laughed when asked about the contention that Andrea had her husband killed to be with Dell. “I knew Andrea and knew when Joseph Dell became a friend, and it was after all this,” she said.
“Joseph knew he was being recorded. When visiting at the jail, you made her laugh, you provided levity. We all knew we were being recorded.”
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