Girl who died was beaten for her 'own good'
A man who allegedly beat his seven-year-old stepdaughter to death in New York described her as a handful and said he disciplined the girl for her “own good” by regularly hitting her and binding her to a chair in a locked room.
“I would hold her up to the mirror and make her look at herself and I would say, ’Do you really want to live like this? Look at yourself. Talk to yourself. How do you feel about yourself?”’ Cesar Rodriguez, 27, said in an hour-long interview at Riker’s Island jail.
“This is for your own good,” he said he told her. Nixzmary Brown was found dead on January 11 in her home in the city’s Brooklyn borough.
During the interview with three newspaper reporters, Rodriguez did not admit to fatally beating the child, but said “I have a lot of guilt".
But, he said, Nixzmary “was a handful".
He said she recently admitted to burning his six-month-old son with a cigarette lighter.
He said he beat her for it and asked: “How could you do this to a helpless little child?”
He said she constantly broke her siblings’ toys and parents’ belongings.
