Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  Within minutes he declared Rusty Sneiderman dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  The parking lot where, just minutes before, parents had delivered their children to preschool had become a staging ground for patrol cars and other emergency vehicles with lights flashing. Men and women in uniform could be seen inside and outside the school. Crime-scene techs spray-painted orange circles around brass bullet casings and set up little yellow markers; they took measurements and snapped photographs. A pool of coagulating blood was still visible from beyond the crime-scene tape. Police officers fanned out looking for witnesses.

  The first newsperson to arrive was Dick Williams, publisher of the weekly Dunwoody Crier, whose offices were across the street from the preschool. A phone call to his home got Williams to Dunwoody Prep minutes after the paramedics took away the victim. “It’s unheard of,” he said later. “I’ve had this paper for sixteen years and that’s probably homicide number four in all that time.” A former writer and editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a news director for several TV stations, Williams had seen his share of crime scenes, but nothing like this. “There was a chalk outline,” he recalled. “The real impression it made on me was how much blood the human body had. The blood was still there. It covered a large area. There was a slight incline and the blood ran down fifteen feet and four feet wide.”

  Soon the parking lot was teeming with reporters. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the region’s leading daily newspaper, is located in Dunwoody, its office a couple of miles away from the school. News helicopters circled over the preschool, and vans from Atlanta’s local TV stations rolled into the parking lot, telescoping up their transmission poles for live satellite reports. Somewhere in the newsroom of CNN’s world news headquarters, producers at crime-centric HLN took first notice of a story fifteen miles away that one day would be a big part of their programming.

  The early coverage was breathless.

  “A father shot and killed minutes after dropping off his children at preschool,” the anchor of Channel 2 Action News (“Live. Local. Late-breaking”) announced to lead the afternoon newscast. The co-anchor added: “We talked to worried parents,” then tossed to reporter Erin Coleman in the field. “I just got off the phone with Dunwoody police. They tell me right now they are out actively searching for the man that shot this father.”

  “And now—panic outside a preschool,” began Fox TV affiliate anchor Tom Haynes on that night’s telecast. “A man murdered after dropping off his young son … Tonight a shooting suspect is still at large.” The account in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution echoed the tone of disbelief. DUNWOODY MAN WAS UNLIKELY VICTIM, read the headline over a story that began, “Russell ‘Rusty’ Sneiderman didn’t see it coming.” It called the murder a “sensational crime” that “offers few obvious avenues for investigation.”

  * * *

  Quiet, leafy Dunwoody represents all that locals savor about life Outside the Perimeter, where suburbs, shopping centers, and office parks dominate the landscape. The world within the I-285 Perimeter loop is considered more urban—downtown Atlanta’s gleaming skyscrapers are at the center—with closer access to corporate offices, fine restaurants and bars, the theater and college and professional sports. Georgia Tech is ITP (Inside the Perimeter) and so are the stadiums for the Falcons and Braves. Much debate rages on whether one should live OTP or ITP (that is, if one has a choice), and in many places the differences are not distinct. Dunwoody and neighboring Sandy Springs, with their sprawling office complexes and the large Perimeter Mall anchored by a Nordstrom, are said to have an “ITP feel”; the mansions and estates of ITP Buckhead that the pro athletes and music stars call home could seem OTP.

  Carved out of farmland beginning in the 1970s, Dunwoody’s residential streets wind through old groves of pine and oak. The houses are built on large wooded lots set back from the street in the “five-four-and-the-door” design: five windows on the top story and four windows on the bottom with a door in the middle. Nearly every subdivision has tennis courts, and the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association is located here.

  “There’s a joke here,” says Dick Williams, the Crier’s publisher. “What do you wear to a funeral in Dunwoody? A black tennis dress.”

  Dunwoody is symbolized by its favorite son, Ryan Seacrest, who grew up here and developed his broadcasting skills by giving morning assemblies over the PA system at Dunwoody High School before working at a local radio station. Seacrest has lost none of his boyish good looks from his 1992 senior high school prom picture, and he maintains local ties. An old high school friend, now the assistant principal, arranged to fly a Dunwoody mass media class to the American Idol set in 2011 for a backstage visit with Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson, and Steven Tyler.

  It’s the kind of place that people want to get transferred to. “Dunwoody was the first suburb of Atlanta essentially created by Yankees,” says Williams. “I’ve never figured out the chicken-and-egg part of it, but for some reason it became the suburb of choice for business executives transferred to Atlanta from other places.” IBM, which has offices all over Atlanta, has drawn many people, as has GE in nearby Marietta. The schools are top-notch, the mall the best in the region, the weather never too cold in the winter, and the brutal southern summer heat and humidity are tempered by the shade from hundred-year-old trees and the air-conditioning in every home. With several churches, a large Jewish community center, and a powerful homeowners’ association, life in Dunwoody is dominated by God and city planning. A tree can’t be cut down here unless a new one is planted to replace it. Trash and recycling pickup comes four times a week.

  Residents follow community issues with the zeal of the recently converted. A fiercely fought incorporation battle raged to unshackle Dunwoody from sprawling DeKalb County government—and what locals long complained were DeKalb’s unresponsive bureaucrats and ineffective police who ignored Dunwoody’s concerns over higher-crime areas to the south ITP. Dunwoody was accused of siphoning off tax revenues, particularly from the lucrative Perimeter Mall, from other DeKalb County communities, and every argument seemed to be shaded by the issue of race. Dunwoody is 80 percent white while the rest of DeKalb County is a majority African American.

  Incorporation ultimately prevailed—and a city and a police department were born in 2008. With incorporation came great promises of a better and safer Dunwoody. Now, after a few short seconds of gunfire, Dunwoody Prep had become that all-too-familiar American tableau: the school-shooting scene.

  Dunwoody Prep promotes itself as a mini-Ivy, a first literal baby step to Harvard, promising “an environment where students are exposed to a rich balance of academic and social skills that afford them a bright future in an increasingly competitive world.” Infants receive care in “small developmentally appropriate groups” with a “home-like atmosphere where babies are rocked, cuddled and surrounded by love.” Toddlers then are nudged to “make the transition toward independence” and begin the “language experience” through creative movement, art, outdoor play, music, and singing. By age two, students “begin the preparation for the academic skills needed” to advance to the older levels. They develop “their individual self-help skills while promoting self-worth and self-esteem.” By preschool—ages three to five—they’re immersed in a dizzying array of experiences: math, “pre-reading and pre-writing activities,” science, social science skills, art and music, computers, Spanish, sports, and “social and play skills.”

  The school assures parents that “the safety and security of our students and staff is something we take very seriously.” It installed what the website calls a “state of the art security system” with “cameras monitoring every classroom, every entranceway, all of our playgrounds and all over the exterior of our buildings.” Security locks protect every entrance.

  Within minutes of the shooting, school staff scrambled to clear the premises. Parents receiving calls off their emergency cards converged on the school—or sent their nannies—to pick up their childre
n. One of the few parents left by the time the media arrived was a woman named Natalia Kelly, who was interviewed by several stations while she carried her young child, who was wearing a paper hat. “The last place you’d think that a child may be in danger is at a school, especially a preschool,” she told reporters. “There are children there that are only three months old. And the fact that any parent could just happen to have been dropping off their child in a car seat and could have been hit by accident, or a child on the playground. And so I don’t understand even if this was intentional.” Another parent, Katie Ackerman, told a TV reporter, “I was terrified to think that something could have happened to a child. It’s very scary.”

  The Dunwoody Police Department whisked its public information officer to the school to offer what little investigators knew. Sergeant Mike Carlson said that shortly after 9 a.m. a bearded man opened fire with four shots on a parent dropping his son off at school, then fled in a silver minivan heading west on Mount Vernon Road. He stressed that no children were harmed. By evening, the victim was identified as Russell Sneiderman of Dunwoody.

  Within hours, interviews with Rusty’s friends and colleagues and a scan of social networking sites, online databases, and company and government websites produced a glowing biography. Rusty was by all accounts a successful man of business with a background in finance and insurance. Raised in the Cleveland area, educated as an undergraduate at the University of Indiana before pursing a graduate degree, he came to Dunwoody from Boston to take a position as the CFO of a large Atlanta company. He’d recently struck out on his own as an entrepreneur. He had no known enemies, no criminal record, was active in local charities and in the Jewish community. Nearly every media account took note that he possessed a Harvard MBA.

  “It’s like everybody lost a brother,” a former schoolmate, Abby Stadlin, who attended kindergarten through high school with Rusty, told the Cleveland Jewish News. “Many of us have taken similar paths [in our lives], and we’re all connected. That’s why it’s so shocking.” Words like kind, caring, professional, focused, and thoughtful filled the early news reports. Rusty served on the boards of the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation, a medical charity in Atlanta, and the Autism Society of America–Greater Atlanta. “For someone as young as him, that was unusual and impressive,” ASAGA president Claire Dees told a reporter. “He definitely had a heart for other people.” Ken Finkel, a former board president of the OI Foundation, added: “Some people walk into a room and carry themselves in such a manner that you know they are well educated, sharp, attuned and soak up information quickly. That was Rusty.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Rusty’s friend Jonathan Ganz told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Another friend, Matt Davidson, who was Rusty’s college roommate, added, “I can guarantee you no one would have predicted this was going to be the way his life would end.”

  The early speculation was that Rusty was the victim of some sort of hit. Casey Jordan, a criminologist and professor at Western Connecticut State University, told Pete Combs’s radio show AM 750/95.5 FM News/Talk WSB not long after the incident that the shooting looked like “an organized hit”; the killer was either somebody who had a vendetta against Rusty or a shooter hired by somebody who did. Everything about the murder said professional assassin, she said, from the nondescript attire to stymie identification, to the getaway vehicle without plates, the firing of multiple shots to make sure the job was done, and the fact that the victim’s luxury car was left at the scene. “This man took precautions to make sure he fit the description of thousands of people and thousands of cars,” Jordan said.

  The Dunwoody Crier also saw the possible work of a professional assassin. “The person who did this wanted this guy dead,” a source told the paper, “and he made sure that he did the job.” Publisher Dick Williams later said, “My personal theory was that it was a mob hit. I looked at Rusty’s business background—he started a lot of companies, and I could see maybe some disgruntled investors could have been there. And look at the way it was done: the two shots at close range, the van engine still running, the guy jumps out of the van and bam! Bam!”

  The crime scene offered few answers and little evidence: a dead body and four brass shell casings scattered on the blacktop near Rusty’s car. This told police the shooter used a semiautomatic, either a .40 or a .44 caliber, but ballistics couldn’t narrow it down to a make or model of gun, much less where or when it was purchased. If a murder weapon was ever found, the casings and slugs could be compared to make a positive ID. Rusty’s car wasn’t stolen.

  Eyewitnesses all told a similar story: a man, a van, and a gun. Nobody caught a license plate number, and most believed the van didn’t have plates. Nobody recognized the shooter though most agreed the beard looked fake. Security cameras trained on the parking lot captured the van entering and leaving but didn’t show the actual shooting. The footage went to a private technician for analysis, but a quick viewing showed the same thing the witnesses had already described. The van had no license plates; the shooter’s image was obscured through the vehicle windows. An alert went out for the van, but with Interstate 285 so close, the vehicle could be anywhere by now, either hundreds of miles away or blending in with thousands of family vans just like it in the Atlanta suburbs.

  Shortly after 9 a.m., Detective Andrew Thompson of the Dunwoody Police Department heard the original radio call mistakenly alerting police to an incident at the bank. When word came across the radio that the getaway car was a silver van heading down Mount Vernon Road, he drove farther ahead and parked at an intersection in the hope of intercepting the suspect. But no silver vans appeared, and Thompson was relieved by police from neighboring Sandy Springs. He then went to Dunwoody Prep. His boss Sergeant Cortellino handed the case to Thompson, making him the lead detective, while Cortellino went to the impound lot where Rusty’s car was being processed by crime-lab techs.

  Previously an officer with the Atlanta Police Department for eight years, Thompson had only two years’ experience as a detective, working narcotics, before coming to Dunwoody. This was his first turn as lead investigator for a homicide. He was pacing around the crime scene, getting the lay of the land, when he saw Andrea arrive. He didn’t know her then but assumed she was close to the victim. He would recall her behavior as “very loud, very dramatic.” Her mother and father later drove up and were about to go under the crime-scene tape when Thompson directed them inside the daycare center. “I told them that Rusty had been hurt,” he would recall later in court. “That was the extent of what I told them.” He hadn’t spoken to Andrea, who by now was inside with Cortellino.

  Thompson spoke briefly to the eyewitnesses—Craig Kuhlmeier, Aliyah Stotter, and Chris Lang—and the pediatrician, Terrence Gfroerer, who had attempted to resuscitate Rusty. He took down their contact information for longer follow-up interviews. He called in the crime-scene technicians to take measurements, photograph the scene, and collect evidence. Rusty had few personal effects when he died—an envelope in his jacket, a wedding ring, and a watch. Nobody could find his wallet. The witnesses hadn’t seen the gunman take the wallet—the presumption was Rusty had raced out to drop off his son and perhaps go to the post office and had simply forgotten it.

  A call to another detective at the Atlanta Medical Center confirmed that Rusty had arrived in grave condition. After spending an hour at the crime scene, Thompson made the half-hour drive south to the hospital. In the family waiting room he met Andrea and her family—her parents and her brother Todd. By now they had been notified of Rusty’s death and appeared in no condition to speak to police. Thompson asked Andrea a couple of questions, seeking any information to tell him where to begin the investigation. She said only that Rusty had planned to have a lunch meeting with his partner in a business venture. She gave Thompson the partner’s name.

  Thompson returned to the Dunwoody Police Department and drew up two search warrants, one for Rusty’s car, the other for his house.

  It was dark
when Thompson and Cortellino pulled up to the Sneiderman house on Manget Court. The Sneidermans lived on a cul-de-sac in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house that a Realtor would later describe as an “impeccable luxury home in a great Dunwoody neighborhood.” It sat on a half-acre wooded lot against a forest traversed by walking paths. When they rang the doorbell, a couple who identified themselves as Andrea’s parents opened the door. Thompson told them he had a search warrant and wanted to come in.

  “We are a house in mourning,” said Andrea’s mother. Andrea’s father told them they couldn’t come in, according to Thompson.

  Thompson told him that police had a warrant and to get out of the way or go to jail for obstruction when Sergeant Cortellino interjected. Cortellino said they would come back tomorrow. In the paramilitary culture of police departments, a detective on his first murder case would never argue with a supervising sergeant. Thompson would later leave little doubt that he disagreed with the gentle handling of the family.

  “I don’t normally tell them I’m coming out to serve a search warrant to preserve the integrity of the case,” he said later in court. “If you give a person notification, [it] gives them the opportunity to destroy or hide or move the evidence.” (Later, Cortellino would say he didn’t remember going to the house at all that night; he also said they never had a warrant until the next day.)

  Dunwoody has a special relationship between its citizens and police, one born from the founding aspirations of the city. Under DeKalb County rule, Dunwoody residents complained about what they saw as a law enforcement agency distracted by higher-crime areas to the south. A Dunwoody resident reporting a burglary or stolen car radio could wait an average of seventeen minutes or more for a patrol car, if one showed up at all. Many reports were taken over the phone. Paying more taxes than others in DeKalb County, Dunwoody residents found this unacceptable, and after incorporation made the police department the centerpiece of the city plan. More than a third of the initial fourteen-million-dollar budget went toward a department with thirty-five sworn officers and five civilian assistants and technicians. “We are committed to developing a top-notch Police Department that interacts daily with the residents and businesses of Dunwoody,” the newly hired chief of police, Billy Grogan, said at the time, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People need to see police cars out there.”