A surveillance video of the family of Nixzmary Brown in a Target department store on Flatbush Avenue two days before the child died was portrayed by a prosecutor today as an indication that the girl was too battered to appear in public.

“This video is direct evidence that Nixzmary was left alone from the family and separated from the public,” said prosecutor Linda Weinman at the Brooklyn Supreme Court trial of Nixzaliz Santiago, the 7-year-old victim’s mother.

The tape shown to the jury focuses on three different locations in the store: the register, elevator and exit.

Judge Patricia M. DiMango told the jury that they should base their decision, “solely for what it depicts and nothing more.”

Nixzmary’s stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez was convicted of manslaughter earlier this year and is serving a 26-and-one-third to a 29-year sentence.

Jeffrey Pers, security manager at the Target on Flatbush Avenue testified that he provided a copy of the surveillance tape to detectives. Pers confirmed the three locations where the family was shown.

Pers was shown two receipts as evidence submitted by prosecutors that were recovered by detectives on Jan. 11, 2006. He confirmed that the dates on the receipts matched with the day the tape was played.

Assistant District Attorney Kelly Casey later identified the people on the tape. On cross-examination, defense attorney Kathleen M. Mullin tried to undermine Casey’s credibility by pointing out that the lead prosecutor was her boss.

On the eve of the MTA’s monthly board meeting two influential members of the City Council today “stormed” transit headquarters armed with a petition rejecting the proposed fare hike.

“I’ve heard from over 2,000 riders and they resoundingly reject another fare hike,” said Councilman Joseph Addabbo in midtown. Last month his Fight the Hike web-based and grass roots campaign launched, collecting over 2,000-signed signatures opposing the fare hikes.

“These testimonials agree fare hikes is something we do not want,” he added.

In addition to a fare increase The MTA is seeking cuts in subway, bus, and commuter rail service to prepare for a $900 million dollar deficit next year, according to published reports. Last March the MTA raised unlimited Metro Cards fares from $76 to $81.

Addabbo was joined at the press conference by Councilman John Liu who is chairman of the transportation committee. “When tax receipts dip, there is a tremendous pressure to increase fares, displacing the consequences of such fiscal management on the riding public,” he said. “ This campaign is to get a sense on how the public feels.”

MTA officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

A defiant and embattled Rep. Charles Rangel today refused to step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, but his lawyer Lanny Davis said in a telephone conference that Rangel himself would hire an investigator to look into his tax returns.

“Rangel will conduct an independent review of his disclosure statements over the last 20 years, and income tax filings for the past 20 years,” Davis said.

Under intense pressure from news reports and Republican calls for his resignation, the Harlem Democrat has had to answer to inconsistencies in the omission of income on his tax returns.

Rangel, who recently fired his accountant said he would hire an auditor to review his finances and “direct the accounting firm to deliver its report to the House Ethics committee” before he or Davis received it.

Rangel’s woes started when he failed to report rental profits from homes he has in Washington and the Caribbean and the sale of a home in Florida.

Saying it was an oversight, Rangel admitted not listing the $75,000 rental profit he has made from a villa he has owned in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic since 1988.

Rangel said he didn’t know he had to report the income on the villa, but it was later revealed that federal taxes were owed for the property.

Rangel also failed to reveal the sale of a home he and his wife owned in Washington in 2003 and a profit made on a Florida condominium that was bought in 2004 and sold in 2006. The profit resulted from an under-assessment of the value of the property, investigators determined.

Davis said that Rangel never intended to conceal anything about his finances.

“He wanted to show in more than any way that he could, that he is confident that he has done nothing intentionally wrong and if he’s made errors, they were inadvertent and that he has nothing to hide,” he added.

Brooklyn DA Charles J. Hynes and six Brooklyn pastors announced today a plan to not prosecute and give a $200 debit card to anyone turning in an illegal gun to several local churches on Saturday.

The first gun buyback program in July was a success, drawing in 697 guns in just six hours, Hynes said at a press conference.. This followed a 1999 program where people were able to get $100 for trading in a gun at police stations.

“People would be less hesitant of going into a church than a police station or office building,” he said.

Firing range officers, detectives and police officers will screen each firearm individually to see that they are working properly.

“There are no questions asked and no identification is asked,” Hynes added.

People are asked to turn in guns in shoeboxes, plastic or paper bags. Though there is no limit of guns one person can bring, one can get a debit card for only three firearms.

“Every gun that is turned in, means that a life has been saved,” said Reverend B.T. McCollum of Saint Anthony Baptist Church.

Officials will accept ammunition without payment.

Officials plan to run the program again next month.

“There’s going to be a point where we run out of money,” Hynes said.

Though the NYPD has an ongoing program where anybody can turn in a firearm at any police station for $100, Hynes said that the program should be institutionalized.

“I see no downside,” he added.

A lot of people want to discontinue the lowly penny but some kids in Queens found a good use for the outmoded coin yesterday.

At the Atlas Park shopping center in Middle Village,Queens, Bobbi
and the Strays, an adoption agency for abused and abandoned animals
received a nice donation from the pre-school class of Dry Harbor
playschool.

Collecting pennies since september 2007, Mrs. Roberta Maureau and her
class of 20 students counted their change at a local Commerce Bank and
were able to donate $500 to the animal shelter,beating last year’s
collection of $371.

“This is about compassion and responsiblity,” said Angelo Russo, manager
of the Commerce bank, that donated an additional $250 making the grand
total in donations $750.

“They actually learned about compassion and how a little bit can go a
long way” said Maureau of the children.

Once the change was counted and the check was signed, the children were
rewarded for all their hard work with juice boxes and cupcakaes before
walking over to Bobbi and the strays to present the check.

“I’m totally overwhelmed,” said Bobbi Giordano, owner of the adoption
agency. “They are a special group of children and they are learning to
share and how to care for animals.”

Bobbi’s six-month-old pomeranian barked in appreciation.

The City Council and the Department of Building (DOB) officials discussed at City Hall yesterday 12 bills proposed to address construction site safety in the wake of many recent fatal accidents.

Even as they spoke and unknown to them, a construction worker was plunging to his death from a scaffold on the Triborough Bridge in Queens. The victim was not immediately identified.

At the hearing, Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn said the recent accidents “serve as painful reminders of how dangerous it is to work in this industry,” and she, with other officials wanted to make job sites safer for the workers and the neighbors.

“As far as my staff and I are concerned, construction safety must always be the Department’s highest priority,” DOB’s new Acting Commissioner Robert LiMandri said.

Among other measures, Housing and Buildings Committee members urged the department to deny permits to developers who have repeatedly violated the city’s building codes and zoning laws and to make it unlawful for an individual to use any supported scaffold without a user certificate.

The bills also introduced ideas of providing training and introductions on interpretations and applications of the zoning resolution, building codes, electrical codes and other laws to all inspectors.

In addition, the Department professionals who participate in the professional certification program should carry professional liability insurance.

Some officials proposed a bill encouraging appointment of an accountable independent monitor to sites with more than three hazardous or major violations within any six-month period and the monitor will stay at the site until the Department is satisfied that there is no need for the monitor to be there any longer or until the construction activities are concluded. Creations of hotlines for employees to report any unsafe conditions at the site, as well as the creation of multilingual signs and manuals of languages spoken most often at the site for workers were also proposed.

Representatives of local real estate groups and construction unions suggested even stronger measures, such as replacing the DOB with a public corporation that would act more decisively than the lumbering and embattled city bureaucracy.

“The Buildings Department is collapsing under the weight of its own reform,” said Louis J. Coletti, a spokesman for the real estate industry.

LiMandri opposed creating a hotline. He said that the operators for 311 were trained to quickly route construction violations to DOB specialists.

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer testified that 13 lives have been lost as the result of construction accidents here and in 2007, injuries on construction sites occurred at the rate of almost one per day.

“To fix this problem, government agencies beyond DOB, labor leaders, developers, local residents, and Washington, D.C., must all be part of the solution,” he said.

The Brooklyn trial of a former Haitian paramilitary leader convicted of mass murder in his native land and brought up on charges of grand larceny and mortgage fraud was postponed today but that didn’t stop his local critics from taking to the streets and demanding he be punished to the full extent of  the law.

Put off  till July was the trial of Emmanuel Constant, former commander of the Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti, a right-wing military group accused of killing and torturing thousands of supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990’s.

Labeled by critics as a “notorious Haitian human rights abuser,” Constant was recently indicted as a participant in a mortgage fraud ring that defrauded banks around the city. He was a real estate broker who sold houses in Cambria heights,
Queens, for Rigaud Realty.

In 2006 Constant, along with six other people involved was charged with grand larceny, forgery, and falsifying records for fraud that authorities said occurred from 2004 to 2006.

In 2007 he served 10 months of a one-to-three-year negotiated sentence for mortgage fraud on
Long Island. Sources say that prosecutors had agreed to a concurrent sentence of one-to-three years for similar charges in
Brooklyn.

At a hearing scheduled in May 2007 lawyers for the Federal Department of Homeland Security argued that Constant should be sentenced to time served for the mortgage fraud case in order to expedite his deportation to Haiti to face the outcome of his conviction in 2002, when a Haitian court sentenced Constant to life in prison for organizing a massacre of Aristide supporters in 1994 as a leader of FRAP. 

In 2002, before he could be detained by Haitian authorities, the 50-year-old defendant fled to the United States to a Haitian-American neighborhood in Queens. Outrage broke out in the Haitian community where Constant resided. Haitian and human right groups asked the U.S. government to extradite constant back to Haiti, so he would face the outcome of his trial, but U.S. officials said that the Haitian justice system was not equipped to give Constant a fair trial and he was allowed to reside in the U.S.

Officials also stated that Constant was allowed to work in the
U.S. Years later Constant was arrested for grand larceny and mortgage fraud charges. He remains in U.S. custody, but has not served his sentence for crimes he committed in Haiti.    

Some activists see the mortgage fraud trial as an opportunity for Constant to be punished for several of his offenses. They are asking that he be held accountable for crimes he committed in U.S. and
Haiti.  

A small group of protesters standing across the street from the court held signs that referred to Constant as a death squad leader. They talked to pedestrians through a megaphone while traffic passed by.

They asked that Constant serve the maximum sentence for crimes he committed in the U.S. then be deported to Haiti to serve time there.

“The problem now is there is so much political instability [in Haiti] and now with the food prices going up it will be very difficult to try him,” said Chaneen Cummings, a paralegal and representative of Center for Constitutional Rights. 

“We fear that he might go back and face a system which cannot properly give him the sentence he deserves,” she added.

Last year Constant was sued Manhattan Federal Court by a coalition of advocacy groups on behalf on Haitian women who testified that they were raped and tortured during Constant’s “campaign for violence against women,” said Cummings.  The plaintiffs were awarded $19 million in the civil case which the defendant never paid.

“He did not take it seriously,” she said.

“He seems to be taking every possible opportunity to delay the trail and drag things out,” said Kim Ives, a member of International Support Media Network.

He pointed out that this is the six or seventh time the trial has been delayed.

Ives said that pushing back the trial hindered protesters in their attempt to call attention to his crimes.

He added, “It is his strategy to try to wear us down.”  

The former mental patient accused of stalking Uma Thurman was found guilty today by a Manhattan Supreme Court jury of stalking and harassing the movie star for nearly three years. 

The defendant, the son of a physicist and a homemaker, was acquitted of two other harassment charges.

Jack Jordan, 37, faces up to one year in prison and was ordered by Justice Gregory Carro to have a psychiatric exam before his sentencing on June 2.

Somber-faced, Jordan was led from the courtroom in handcuffs.

Jordan became obsessed with an Academy Award-nominated actress after seeing her in the movie “Kill Bill.” Since then he has been sending Thurman and her family harassing cards and e-mails.

His lawyer, George Vomvolakis, who kept insisting that his smitten client did nothing illegal and was just in love, said he surprised at the verdict reached after two days of deliberation.   “This verdict is unreasonable, it makes no sense,” said the lawyer who vowed to file an appeal.“This guy couldn’t hurt a fly,” said Vomvolakis outside the courtroom after the verdict. “He stole a mango when he was in college, that was the extent of his criminal record.” 

Jordan had testified that he did not mean to upset or harass Thurman and realized he was foolish.”I had this feeling of longing for Ms. Thurman and I was trying to explain it,” he told the jury. “I was not trying to scare her in any way.”

Thurman did not show up for the verdict, but she testified last Thursday that she was scared for her life and her two children. She first met Jordan on the set of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” in 2005, when he pretended to be the family’s friend and gave her a card containing a picture of a headless bride, drawings of him and Thurman next to an open grave, and handwritten words; “Chocolate, mouth, soft, kissing.”

Jordan, who graduated from the University of Chicago, was living in his car on the
Lower East Side and working as a part-time lifeguard. His parents committed him to a mental institution after he showed up at Thurman’s trailer. 

“He was just trying to make her love him back,” said Vomvolakis.  

The chairman of the City Council Environmental Committee blasted Mayor Bloomberg at a Water Board hearing in
Queens today for shooting down a plan that would have lowered a proposed 14.5 percent water rate hike.

The move would have lowered the rate hike by five percent and saved some 825,000 city residents nearly $122 million in fiscal year 2009, officials said.

The Bloomberg administration has diverted funds from the water bills to fund projects unrelated to the city’s water and sewer system, charged Councilman James Gennaro, Democrat of Queens.

Each year, the Water Board is required to raise enough revenue to cover its operational and bonding costs and also must make a payment on 15 percent of its debt service.  But Gennaro says those additional payments are pinching the pockets of middle class families.

“This is an out of control situation that’s just going to get worse over time,” said Gennaro.  “The Bloomberg administration should get its hands out of the pockets of water bill-paying New Yorkers and commit to using the revenues collected from water bills for water and sewer projects only.”

The current rate hike exceeds the 11.5 percent increase projected a year ago. It is especially high since the city began cracking down on property owners who were delinquent to make their water bill payments and lessen the burden of future rate increases.

Gennaro said the rate increase should be around a five and a half percent instead of 14.5 percent. He also says these rate increases set bad precedents which will cause them to continue to rise every year and he estimated they would surpass $300 million by the fiscal year 2015.

The Mayor had another view.

“They spend the money on real projects which we need,” Bloomberg said Monday. “From what I can tell, they do it reasonably efficiently, and this seems to me to be brouhaha about nothing from a couple of people who want to run for higher office.”

“We have to keep the king’s cotton picking hands off water and sewer money,” retorted Gennaro.  “This is what has to be done to avoid outrageous water rate increases every year.”

The city proposed another increase in December of 18 percent, citing lower than expected revenues. That proposal did not go through when the city agreed to crack down on delinquent payments.

The architects behind the proposed renovation and construction surrounding St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village better head back to the drawing board if they hope to gain’s the city’s approval, warned the Landmarks Preservation Commission today.

Voicing their opinions about the massive construction project during a public hearing at the LPC’s headquarters, committee members stood united against the proposed demolition of certain historical buildings on the hospital’s campus.

“The buildings we are being asked to consider for demolition are in a historic district,” said Commissioner Margery Perlmutter. “We should not have to fight for the life of a building in a historic district.”

The Rudin family, the private developer that purchased St. Vincent’s after it filed for bankruptcy in 2005, proposed constructing residential housing on the site of an existing medical office building on West 11^th Street..  The 12-story structure, known as the Spellman building, would need to be completely demolished to make room for the new condos.

“Spellman is the biggest anomaly in this historic district,” said Shelly Friedman, a representative of the Rudin family.  “It doesn’t match architecturally with the rest of the area and should be okay to remove.”

Members of the LPC were quick to defend the historical merits of the 140-foot tall building that towers over the rest of the campus.

“The Spellman building reinforces the special qualities of this historic district,” argued Commissioner Stephen Byrnes. “Its ornamental front door crowned by a cross is an important reminder that the most important Catholic hospital in
New York City has been here for over 150 years.”

Developers also want to remove nine other buildings in the area they argue do not fit with the rich architectural history of Greenwich Village.  Committee members argued the buildings would be better suited for renovations than full-scale demolition.

“This is not a discussion about what should be, but what authentically exists and reflects the history of an area,” said Commissioner Roberta Gratz. “To suggest destroying the real streetscape diversity to build an interpretation of what should have been is, at best, an architectural conceit.”

At the meeting’s conclusion, Committee Chairman Robert Tierney suggested developers rethink their proposal before submitting it for the LPC’s approval.