Dunwoody Prep Shooting: Defense Questions Interview with Police

Monday morning, in the second of two Pre-trial motion hearings in the case against Hemy Neuman, his defense attorneys harped on Neuman’s first face-to-face interview with police.

Neuman is accused of gunning down Russell ‘Rusty’ Sneiderman on Nov. 18 outside of a Dunwoody pre-school where Sneiderman had just dropped off his 2-year-old son.

According to court testimony, police met Neuman on Jan. 4 at a Buckhead apartment where he’d been staying since he moved out of his East Cobb home in October.

The focus of the defense questioning Monday was around when Neuman was Mirandized. A Miranda warning informs criminal suspects of their rights to an attorney and other rights when being questioned by police.

Neuman was questioned on Jan. 4 because the police had connected him with the Kia minivan seen driven away from the scene.

Two detectives spoke to him for about a half hour, but he was staying with an elderly woman, who police thought was eavesdropping, so they took the interview to the Dunwoody Police Department interrogation room.

In the interrogation room, he again spoke to police.

“We did not Mirandize immediately,” said Det. Gary Cortellino of the Dunwoody Police Department at Monday’s hearing. “I had no idea what his role was.”

During that initial period of time, Cortellino and a fellow detective spoke with Neuman about his job at General Electric, his upbringing (Cortellino said he was interested that Neuman had been born in Mexico, raised in Israel and had eventually moved to the United States), and questions about his roommate in Buckhead.

“They were very, very basic general background questions,” Cortellino said.

Other conversation included discussion about where Andrea Sneiderman, who worked with Neuman, was at the time of the incident.

About an hour into the talks, they gave Neuman his Miranda rights.

“I realized that he perhaps knew more about the date of the incident than we realized, so I gave him his Miranda rights,” Cortellino said.

Four hours later, Neuman was arrested as a suspect in the murder of Rusty Sneiderman.

Defense attorney Bob Rubin questioned when police realized Neuman was Andrea Sneiderman’s boss at GE. Det. Cortellino said he didn’t make that connection until further interrogation and maintained that Neuman was not a suspect until later in the interview process.

Monday morning, there were also several search warrants that were questioned by the defense. That line of questioning is scheduled to continue this afternoon.

The defense in the case filed a motion to suppress statements made by Neuman, along with a motion to suppress evidence found in several search warrants.

DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Gregory Adams gave the defense and prosecution three days to file briefs about Neuman’s statement and will make a decision after those are submitted.

Check back with Dunwoody Patch for updates on Monday's hearing