Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  The announcement came as a surprise. Most had expected a preliminary hearing, where James’s office would present a bare-bones case against Hemy to secure a charge. The hearing could have answered some of the burning questions regarding why Hemy Neuman had allegedly murdered Rusty Sneiderman. By taking the case to a grand jury, James kept the details under wraps. Grand jury proceedings are conducted in secrecy, even from defense attorneys, and charges are virtually assured in all cases.

  “We will not try this case in the media nor will we discuss the evidence that will be presented at trial,” James explained. “Our job is to the present the facts, the truth and to seek justice.” He underscored that the policy of secrecy would continue. “I cannot comment on what may or may not happen in the future as far as our evidence,” he said, but added, “If I were not confident I would not have presented the case to the grand jury this morning.”

  The next step, he said, was an arraignment for Hemy, where a judge would formally present the charges to him, allow him to enter a plea, and set a trial date. “Again,” James said, “to ensure the integrity of this case, I will be unable to answer any questions from the media as it pertains to this case.”

  Not only were the media and public left in the dark, Hemy would also have to wait to find out what evidence prosecutors had against him. Soon after his arrest, his mother, Rebecca Cohen, and her boyfriend reached out to a family friend who was a lawyer. That lawyer referred them to Robert Rubin and Doug Peters, who have a three-partner practice in Decatur, not far from the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit Superior Court building where Hemy’s case was being handled.

  In January, the two attorneys squeezed into a cubicle in the visitor area at the DeKalb County Jail and through Plexiglas spoke with Hemy Neuman. “In every case, when you meet someone whose life is in jeopardy and they’re looking for someone to put their trust in to save their life, you hope to build a rapport,” Rubin said later. “We had an immediate rapport with Hemy Neuman. It was more of a personal connection. He felt comfortable talking to us. We felt good about him. We liked him. He was a very likable guy.”

  Both attorneys have long practiced in the Atlanta area. Raised in Ohio, Rubin moved to Atlanta in the late 1970s to complete his undergraduate studies and law school at Emory University, northeast of downtown and close to Decatur. After working as a public defender in Fulton County, Georgia, and in the Georgia Attorney General’s Office prosecuting doctors appearing before the state medical board, he went into private practice while also teaching criminal litigation as an adjunct professor at his alma mater.

  His three decades in Atlanta have given him a trace of a local accent, though he doesn’t come close to his partner. With his bow ties, pocket hankies, and smooth drawl, Douglas Peters affects the very picture of a gentleman southern lawyer. Born and raised within a few miles of his law offices, Peters attended the University of Georgia for his bachelor’s and law degrees, served as an assistant district attorney in Clayton County, Georgia, and as a municipal court judge in the city of Lithonia, twenty-five miles west of Atlanta, before hanging out his shingle in Decatur.

  The two lawyers had their share of high-profile cases dealing with the darkest aspects of the human condition. Rubin represented one of the defendants in the Final Exit Network case, four members of an alleged assisted-suicide group being prosecuted for their roles in a man’s 2008 suicide. Peters has developed an expertise in representing people accused of child abuse and child molestation, including women in shaken baby syndrome cases.

  “When we first sat in that attorney’s booth, the first time we heard Hemy give us his account of what had happened—I’ll never forget that—we both knew, Bob and I, that things were not adding up,” said Peters. “We felt he was out of touch with reality in terms of what he described to us about the offense. Bob and I are not psychiatrists or psychologists. But from the first time we met him, it was not rational how he described it.”

  They needed more information. While awaiting the prosecution’s discovery—the police reports, interview transcripts, lists of physical evidence—the attorneys hoped to learn more from a preliminary hearing.

  “We were anxious to have an opportunity to have an individual judge evaluate the presentation of the case,” Peters told reporters after James announced the grand jury indictment. “Unfortunately, that is not going to be the case.” Until they started getting discovery materials, Rubin added, “We don’t know what the District Attorney knows.” Until then, Hemy would remain behind bars without bail. “He’s obviously distraught,” said Rubin, “for his family and the Sneiderman family.”

  With little known to the public about Hemy or his alleged motivation, the lawyers sought to fill in the gaps. “The arrest of Mr. Neuman is also a tragedy,” Rubin told reporters. “There are a lot of people affected by Mr. Neuman’s arrest: his family, his kids, his friends and coworkers are also affected by this. He’s very emotional, very distraught, very worried about his family and worried about the Sneiderman family.”

  The lawyers also dropped some tantalizing hints that there was more to the case than what had been released publicly. “We do believe there’s somebody else the police should be looking for,” said Rubin. “However, we don’t have the resources of the state to do that kind of investigation.” He didn’t say whom they should be looking for, but the media connected the dots. The next day the Journal-Constitution noted that “the extent of the relationship between Neuman … and Andrea Sneiderman has not been disclosed,” adding with a journalistic wink that “they worked together often.”

  The day of the grand jury indictment brought another player in the case to the forefront. Since Hemy’s arrest his wife, Ariela Neuman, had stayed out of the public eye, all the attention focused on Andrea. Now for the first time her side of the story would filter out. Ariela, too, had hired an attorney, Esther Panitch, a Miami-raised, magna cum laude graduate from the University of Miami’s law school with a local civil and criminal practice. Comfortable in front of the microphones, quick with sound bites, and fond of colorful camera-friendly attire, Panitch would become a constant presence throughout the Sneiderman case (as well as a legal analyst on HLN in other cases) and a force to be reckoned with for both the prosecution and the defense attorneys.

  She made her debut by saying Ariela was “stunned by the allegations and the indictment which came down today,” and revealed that at the time of the murder, the Neumans were separated, having split in October after twenty-two years of marriage. When asked by a TV reporter if Ariela wanted to pass on any thoughts to Rusty’s family, Panitch said, “Mrs. Neuman and her children feel a great deal of compassion for the Sneiderman children.” Her answer pointedly left out Andrea Sneiderman.

  It would be the beginning of an increasingly loud drumbeat: What was Andrea’s role? She still was not talking to the media, but her lawyer did release a statement:

  “The murder of my husband, Rusty Sneiderman, has been devastating to me and our families. I was thankful and relieved when the police made an arrest but I was shocked to learn that the man charged with the murder was my former boss, a person who we thought was a friend of our family.

  “I have been assured by the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office that Mr. Neuman is Rusty’s killer and that they will do everything in their power to bring him to justice. My family and I are cooperating in any way we can to assist them in their efforts.”

  CHAPTER 11

  On a nondescript building along a busy highway a red neon sign flashes OPEN. Over the door is painted an American flag, and next to it a sign advertises a shooting club. Parnell’s Firearms and Range in quaint Woodstock, Georgia, sells a full array of pistols, long guns, ammunition, scopes, reloading supplies, all sorts of gun accessories. The shelves include goods from Remington, Ruger, Browning, Benelli, Weatherby, and US Repeating Arms. The shop also buys new and used antique and collectible guns and provides appraisals. Once you buy a weapon, you can shoot it right away without having to lea
ve the grounds at the indoor shooting range.

  On Halloween Day, 2010, at 2:47 p.m., a call went from Hemy Neuman’s 770 area code Apple iPhone to Parnell’s.

  The evidence came from hundreds of pages of cell phone records produced under subpoena. Detectives who initially thought they were looking for a savvy master criminal instead found in Hemy a man who did virtually nothing to cover his tracks. The trail included not only phone calls made and received, but also Hemy’s whereabouts when he placed the calls—based on the nearest cell phone tower from which the call was “pinged.” The subpoenas also produced a record of virtually everything he did on his laptop and iPad, the history retrievable—in many cases even if it was erased or deleted—with forensic software that finds things hidden amid the memory bramble. David A. Freyman of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation created an image of the data on Hemy’s iPad, extracting both the stored history information plus anything that hadn’t been written over by the device. Among the findings: On October 15, 2010, Hemy created a bookmark labeled “gun.” Over the next two weeks the term range was repeatedly searched.

  When Hemy called Parnell’s on October 31, phone records placed him near a cell tower in Dalton, Georgia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about eighty miles away from Dunwoody up Interstate 75, which bisects the Perimeter and shoots north. This placed him near the Northwest Georgia Trade & Convention Center, a complex of meeting rooms and large banquet halls. The center hosts everything from high school proms and weddings to the Georgia Rampage indoor football games. On this weekend, the center hosted the traveling Eastman Gun Show. As “Proud supporters of your Second Amendment rights since 1981,” the show bills itself as a one-stop shop for “a good deal on the firearm, ammo, holster, scope, clip or magazine, knife or whatever you are looking for,” with sales consummated on the spot. “You may purchase a gun, ammunition and other accessories at the shows and take them home the same day.”

  On that Halloween Day 2010, a Sunday, one of the convention hall’s sixteen security cameras captured Hemy Neuman walking through the admissions area. What he did next wasn’t known as no more footage of him inside the gun mart could be found, and there was no paper trail if he had purchased a weapon. Georgia has among the nation’s most lax gun laws. Residents don’t have to register firearms; in fact, the state prohibits registration. A concealed weapons permit is relatively easy to obtain. The state does forbid so-called straw purchases: Somebody can’t coerce a dealer to sell to somebody other than the actual buyer. And it’s illegal to sell a pistol or revolver to a minor. Certain weapons—including some (but not all) sawed-off shotguns, machine guns, and bazookas—are also illegal to possess without proper federal licenses. The federal government calls for a criminal background check for people buying guns from dealers, but not in private-party sales, as at gun shows like the one Hemy visited.

  One way or another, the day after going to the gun show, a Monday, Hemy Neuman had a gun. He made his way to Woodstock in a semi-rural area near Allatoona Lake. Woodstock relies on day-trip visitors from Atlanta strolling the brick-paved 1870s-era downtown with antiques stores, gift shops, and tearooms. The outskirts are dominated by fast-food restaurants catering to freeway traffic heading to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and beyond.

  Take a right just past the Taco Bell onto Main Street—which is more like a highway—and Parnell’s Range sits on the right. At 6:30 p.m. on November 1, 2010, Hemy walked in. John Turner, a retiree and part-time employee and gun enthusiast whose salary is supplemented by free range time and targets, waited on him. Turner handed Hemy the insurance liability forms required to use one of the store’s six shooting lanes. While state law frowns on paperwork concerning guns, the same is not true of gun ranges, which must worry about getting sued if somebody gets hurt. Hemy signed a form attesting that he had read and understood the safety rules written above. He also printed his name and added the date and time, and for one dollar purchased a target: a two-foot-by-four-foot silhouette of a man with rings providing points for accuracy: the closer to the heart, the higher the score. This is the most popular target at the store, far outselling the conventional bull’s-eye. Hemy’s form reflected that he used the target lane from 6:35 p.m. to 7:05 p.m.

  When investigators interviewed Turner they found that there was no record of the kind of gun Hemy shot. The store keeps track of the manufacturer, model, and caliber of guns loaned for the range. But people who bring their own weapons don’t have to fill in that information. The store did, however, have piles of used shell casings going back months. Some of them could have come from the gun Hemy shot at the range and could be compared to the shells found at the murder scene.

  Investigators filled up fourteen five-gallon buckets of brass and hauled it to ballistics man Kelly Fite. Among the state’s leading ballistics experts, Fite had logged thirty-one years as a firearms supervisor with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation before going out on his own in 1999 as a private consultant. One by one, the Parnell’s casings went under stereomicroscope magnifications of five to thirty times. Fite looked at the telltale ejector marks—where a gun’s mechanism grabs onto a shell after firing and kicks it out of a chamber. Like fingerprints, no two ejector marks are alike, so they can be used for identification in court. Even for an examiner accustomed to tedious work, Fite found this project particularly challenging. He said that there are about one hundred casings per pound, with three hundred pounds in the buckets, working out to thirty thousand casings that went under his microscope. In the end, the effort proved fruitless. Not one matched the murder-scene casings.

  * * *

  Around the same time, Mark Potter, an investigator on loan from the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, was combing through Hemy’s cell phone records when he came across a name that he didn’t recognize: Jan DaSilva. A check against the files found no match to a GE employee or a family member. Potter called the number on the records and a man answered. After hearing what the man had to say, the detective set up a meeting at his workplace.

  The Buckhead Diner on Piedmont Road Northeast is the quintessential ITP restaurant, with enough black-and-white tile, chrome, and neon to evoke a classic America diner but prices and ambience in keeping with Buckhead’s expectations. The restaurant promises a “fun menu” and “taste of nostalgia” to go with “snappy service, upscale atmosphere and retro style [that] gives this Atlanta icon a funky flair all its own.” The restaurant’s website includes a “celebrity spotlight” of black-and-white pictures of guests including Kevin Bacon, Alyson Hannigan and Kathy Griffin, and Eugene Levy.

  On Feruary 22, 2011, Potter met Jan DaSilva outside the Buckhead Diner. A former petty officer in the navy where he was a mechanic on F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets, DaSilva left the service and now parked cars as a valet. Potter placed on the trunk of a car a photo lineup—six pictures of different men—and asked him if he recognized anybody. Without hesitation DaSilva picked out photo number 4—Hemy Neuman.

  The detective asked DaSilva how he knew the man and how DaSilva’s phone number came to be in Hemy’s cell phone records.

  “I sold him my gun,” he said.

  It was a Bersa Thunder 40, a big and powerful handgun—over seven inches long and weighing nearly two pounds. A semiautomatic that can carry up to thirteen rounds, it comes in a black or nickel finish and gets generally glowing reviews from gun owners. Christiangunowner.com gushes that the Bersa Thunder is “worthy consideration for anyone wanting a full sized shooter.” A commenter on thefiringline.com says, “I love this gun. I can shoot it quite well. The weight makes recoil very manageable, and the .40 cal is, in my opinion, the perfect pistol caliber.” A common drawback is that it may be too much gun for people with smaller hands.

  It shoots .40-caliber bullets, the same kind that killed Rusty Sneiderman.

  DaSilva originally obtained the gun on April 8, 2010, from Nick’s Gun and Range on Canton Road in Marietta. He filled out the federally required form from the Bureau of Alcohol, T
obacco and Firearms, passed the criminal background check, and was handed the weapon along with two magazines that carry ten rounds of ammunition each. After six months, however, his interest in firearms was eclipsed by a new passion: skydiving. Needing extra money to pay for his certification to become a skydiving instructor, DaSilva listed the Bersa on a gun sales website called gunlistings.org for $375 in October 2010.

  He received just one email reply on his Yahoo account. A prospective buyer contacted him and asked if the gun was still available. DaSilva said it was and they arranged a date and time to meet, but DaSilva missed the appointment because he had gone skydiving. He sent an apologetic email and asked the potential buyer if he was still interested. They set up a second appointment for October 31, this time at another restaurant where DaSilva also worked as a valet.

  Owned by the same company that operates the Buckhead Diner, the Atlanta Fish Market on Pharr Road NE promises a “relaxing retreat from the hustle and bustle of Buckhead” with fish flown in daily and a “menu printed twice daily.” As DaSilva waited in the parking lot, he got a call on his cell phone call from the man saying he was nearly there. Minutes later a Honda Odyssey minivan pulled up into the big driveway and came to a stop at the valet hut next to DaSilva. After the man introduced himself as Hemy Neuman, they chatted briefly and found some things in common. Hemy said he had been born and raised in Puerto Rico as DaSilva had, immigrating to the United States when he was eighteen. The two now spoke in Spanish. Hemy said he’d graduated from Georgia Tech and had a daughter there; Jan said his uncle went to the university.

  DaSilva then opened a box to show him the Bersa. He explained how the gun worked, gave him a cleaning kit and two kinds of Winchester bullets: about a hundred solid-brass rounds used for target practice and another fifty hollow points designed for self-protection, the hollow points spreading out in a body upon impact, causing maximum harm. Hemy gave him $380 from a wad of $20 bills he had just gotten from an ATM and Jan returned $5 change. Hemy drove off with his gun.