A heretofore secret witness--previously described as a jailhouse snitch--testified in the murder trial of Cesar Rodriguez, charged with killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter Nixzmary Brown in 2006. The witness claimed the girl's mother confessed to killing her daughter.

Nixzaliz Santiago, Nixzmary's mother who will face her own murder trial later, allegedly told the witness that Nixzmary was a bad child and she and Rodriguez beat the young girl in the bathtub. She testified that Santiago "kept having a dream of that night when they had her in the bathtub and they were banging her head in the tub. She dreamt that they were beating the child in the bathtub, that they were using her fists to beat her up and [Cesar] walked away and she stayed...keeps going and Nixzmary became lifeless."

The reason for the mother's fatal anger was that she allegedly caught her seven-year-old daughter administering oral sex to her stepfather on numerous occasions. Bear in mind, this is Cesar Rodriguez's defense--that his wife was angry that he was getting oral sex from her seven-year-old daughter. Another element of Rodriguez's defense is that Nixzmary once purchased a World's Greatest Dad mug for him.

Transcript of the testimony is available here in a pdf file format. And the jailhouse informer's testimony came on the heels of that of the victim's maternal grandmother, who testified that her grandchildren feared Rodriguez. The grandmother is also seeking custody of the remaining grandchildren and $250 million from the city.

The NY Times looks at the city's Spanish-language newspapers' coverage of the case; it seems the Spanish-language media sympathizes with Rodriguez's struggles in raising a family more.