Day One of the Hemy Neuman murder trial focused squarely on the victim’s widow, Andrea Sneiderman, who both the state and the defense say was romantically involved with the man who has acknowledged killing her husband outside a Dunwoody preschool.
Yet as she testified for much of Tuesday afternoon in a sometimes bizarre case that has attracted national attention far beyond Dunwoody's close-knit Jewish community, where both the victim and his killer were well-known, Sneiderman adamantly denied having an affair with Neuman.
“I’m a pretty wholesome individual,” said Sneiderman, 39, the first witness called by the DeKalb County District Attorney’s office. “There was no affair."
Sneiderman's husband, 36-year-old Rusty Sneiderman, was shot by Neuman outside Dunwoody Prep preschool in November 2010.
Prosecutors contend it was an act of cold-blooded murder by a jealous lover determined to get the woman's husband out of the way. The defense says Neuman, who has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity, didn't know the difference between right and wrong at the time.
“I admit to caring about Hemy Neuman,” Andrea Sneiderman said. “He managed to get me to care about him. He was very good at manipulating everyone around him.”
Defense attorney Doug Peters leveled the same accusation against the widow.
Seeking to illustrate to jurors the woman's influence on Neuman, Peters in his opening statement quoted a friend of the defendant's who said the 49-year-old had been "played back and forth like a yo-yo by Andrea."
Questioned by DeKalb Chief Deputy District Attorney Don Geary about her relationship with the man, including reservations for adjoining hotel rooms, marriage proposals and other romantic emails, Sneiderman was at turns dismissive and defiant.
“I had no choice” for the sake of her job and career, she said when asked why she continued traveling with Neuman even after he allegedly had made unwanted advances. Neuman had been Andrea Sneiderman's supervisor at GE Energy.
The woman testified she did not recall emails from Neuman concerning chocolates and flowers left for her in her room during a business trip to Longmont, Colo. She also said she didn't recall her response to the emails, in which she wrote: "So thoughtful, so sweet. I knew you'd try something like this.”
Sneiderman had told Dunwoody police and the DeKalb County District Attorney’s investigators that Neuman was not in Longmont. In her testimony Tuesday, the woman explained her lapse in memory by saying the date of the interview, Jan. 5, "was the day after my boss was arrested for murdering my husband.”
Earlier, during the defense’s opening statement, Peters detailed the dozens of hours of phone calls and hundreds of texts exchanged between Andrea Sneiderman and Neuman.
The night before the shooting, they exchanged three calls, the last of which was 18 minutes long, Peters said. She tried to reach him again the next morning, Nov. 18, 2010, at 9:27 a.m. -- 11 minutes after her husband had been shot.
"In the first hour while she is on the way to the hospital ... she calls Hemy six times," Peters said.
But she never called her husband, a fact Sneiderman acknowledged when questioned by Geary.
“Is that for you to question?” she responded.
She said she been told by a Dunwoody Prep staffer that there had been an accident. “They said you need to come here,” Sneiderman testified.
“No one would tell me what happened,” she said. According to Sneiderman, it would be another hour before she found out, at the hospital, about her husband’s death.
In his opening statement, Peters said doctors who evaluated Neuman diagnosed him as bipolar and suffering from mania and psychosis. Neuman thought Rusty Sneiderman's two children were his and that he was commanded to protect them, the defense attorney said.
But Geary said Neuman’s actions were not those of someone who was insane. The prosecutor recounted how the defendant lay in wait for Rusty Sneiderman outside Dunwoody Prep, emerging to pump three bullets into his victim's chest.
"As Rusty falls, the defendant's not satisfied,” Geary said. “He walks up and, in near contact, he puts [the gun] to Rusty's neck and fires again. Then this man who didn't know the difference between right and wrong goes to his van and drives off quickly, to be lost in the morning rush hour."
Andrea Sneiderman was still on the stand at day’s end under cross-examination by defense lawyer Bob Rubin. Her testimony will resume Wednesday.
Seth Kirschenbaum, the widow's attorney, said, “Mr. Peters made clear in his opening statement that he plans to put Andrea Sneiderman on trial in an attempt to shift the blame from his client."
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