DA: Valdez-Cruz obsessed with girlfriend

Prosecutors say when Leonardo Valdez-Cruz killed his girlfriend Jo'Anna Bird and fled through the window of her New Cassel apartment, he was carrying her cell phone with him.

That cell phone, they say, contained records of phone calls to and from other men - and may have been the evidence Valdez-Cruz was looking for to justify killing the estranged girlfriend with whom he was obsessed.

"His message was always the same," Madeline Singas said in her opening argument Tuesday in Valdez-Cruz's first-degree murder trial. "You can live if you're with me, but if you choose to be with someone else, I'll kill you."

After terrorizing Bird for months, repeatedly calling and visiting her despite multiple orders of protection, Singas said, the 24-year-old Westbury man broke into her home one last time and tortured her to death on March 19, 2009, Singas said.

But Valdez-Cruz's defense lawyer, Dana Grossblatt of Jericho, said prosecutors have no concrete proof against her client, and that evidence of a rocky relationship is a far cry from evidence of murder.

Even as Valdez-Cruz sat in jail for violating Bird's orders of protection, she said, Bird willingly visited him in jail. And she said Bird called him, too, while the orders were in effect.

Grossblatt said the drug angel dust was found in the house where Bird was killed, and Bird's killing could just as easily have resulted from a drug deal gone wrong.

Instead, Grossblatt said police chose to focus their attention on Valdez-Cruz. In doing so, she said, they were taking their lead from Bird's mother, Sharon Dorsett, who later filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Nassau police and district attorney, saying that the two agencies ignored cues that Valdez-Cruz was dangerous.

Singas, however, said the brutal nature of the killing showed that it was committed by someone who knew Bird intimately. Prosecutors charged Valdez-Cruz with first-degree murder under two theories, one of which is that he tortured her before killing her.

"This murder could have been accomplished with a lot less injury," Singas said. "He stabbed her neck hard enough to nick the bones in her spinal cord. He stabbed the woman that bore him a child in the eyes, and she was still alive when he did that."

As her first witness, Singas called the medical examiner who examined Bird's body. As she placed photos of Bird, taken at her autopsy, on a screen before the jury, several members of Bird's family gasped and left the courtroom.

Valdez-Cruz, looking freshly shaved and boyish, shook his head and wept, finally putting his head down on the table in front of him.

Singas also alluded to the Bird family's lawsuit, and that police responded to Bird's home at least four times when Valdez-Cruz was there violating orders of protection in the days before she was killed, but did not arrest him.

An internal review after the killing found that officers did not properly investigate those complaints.

That Valdez-Cruz was not arrested, Singas said in court, "I don't know why."

Then, alluding to a lawsuit, Singas said, "Perhaps another jury will figure it out."

The trial is to resume Wednesday in Nassau County Court.