Arlington Memorial Park covers over a hundred acres of rolling hills, nearly a century old and catering to all faiths, with Catholic and Jewish sections. With forested areas, two lakes, and streams, the cemetery is located just off Mount Vernon Road in Sandy Springs, next to Dunwoody. On Sunday, November 21, the casket was lowered into the rich Atlanta soil. Per Jewish custom, mourners took turns shoveling dirt onto the casket, a final sign of respect, though it’s not for everybody. “I can’t do it,” Rusty‘s father would later say, “because I don’t have the stomach for it.” He certainly couldn’t do it this day. He watched as others dropped dirt on his son’s coffin.
For Donald Sneiderman, the last three days had brought a torrent of emotional upheaval, the events blurred. At the funeral, Donald would shake hands, accept offers of condolences, meet friends and business associates of his son, all the while remembering little if any of it in detail. The nightmare had begun that previous Thursday morning with a phone call to his Cleveland home from Andrea at about 9:30 a.m. “She called and said Rusty had been shot,” he would later recall in court. “She was so, so sorry, and … she was going to Dunwoody Prep to find out what had happened.”
For the next fifteen to twenty minutes, Donald and his wife had waited anxiously for an update from Andrea. Finally, Donald called Dunwoody Prep. “I identified myself and asked them again what had happened, and the lady who answered the phone there said Rusty had been shot.” Donald was told that Rusty had been taken to the Atlanta Medical Center. Donald sent an email to Rusty’s older brother, Steven, who was traveling to Hawaii for vacation. Donald figured Steven’s BlackBerry would pick up the message faster than a phone call since he was in transit.
“Rusty was shot outside Dunwoody Prep this morning,” Donald wrote. “We don’t know the details at this time other than he was shot.” He sent the message at 10:38 a.m., ending with: “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Donald waited a few minutes for Rusty to arrive at the hospital, and then called. He spoke to a physician who at first wouldn’t tell him anything, but then got permission—Donald presumed it was from Andrea. The doctor told him Rusty had arrived with multiple gunshot wounds, that he had not survived.
Numb, Donald sent another email to Steven at 11:06 a.m.: “Rusty passed away this morning. Don’t know anything else.”
Plunged into a fog of shock, Donald and his wife made arrangements to go to Atlanta. He called a friend asking to pick up the mail. He called to cancel newspaper delivery. He sent an email to his brother, a teacher, telling him Rusty had died. In the middle of everything his stockbroker had called. An emotional Donald hung up on him when the stockbroker was in midsentence. Donald called back later to apologize.
At one point, Andrea called him asking for permission to bury Rusty in Atlanta so she and the children could visit the grave. Donald said that would be okay.
When they first heard something had happened to Rusty, Donald and his wife started packing. Now they repacked to include funeral clothes.
They took an afternoon flight to Atlanta, rented a car and drove to Andrea and Rusty’s house in Dunwoody, and stayed there for a time with Andrea and the children before checking into the Marriott Perimeter Center, where Steven’s wife, Lisa, had made a reservation. The next day they returned to the house for the police interview and search. Steven canceled his Hawaiian vacation and flew back with his wife to Atlanta.
Jewish tradition calls for the body to be buried quickly—but the police investigation trumped tradition. Rusty’s body was released to the funeral home within days and Donald placed funeral notices in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Cleveland Jewish News. The notices said that Rusty Sneiderman, a “devoted and loving husband, father, son and loyal friend,” had “died unexpectedly.” The obituary cited his educational and professional accomplishments and charity work. It noted that he was an entrepreneur “in the process of developing a new product for the entertainment industry.” Mourners were asked in lieu of flowers to send donations to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. “Rusty was known for his big heart, and large circle of friends,” it said. “We miss him dearly.”
His death sent shock waves through the Jewish communities in Atlanta and Cleveland. His murder garnered regular coverage in Jewish publications and become a hot topic of discussion on message boards. Remembrances flooded an online guest book for the funeral. A Harvard Business School classmate remembered Rusty as “being a happy, upbeat, friendly, thoughtful contributor to the school experience.” A family friend described him as a “wonderful(!!) man with a huge warm smile and caring heart” and said his children would always feel their father’s love. One of Sophia’s teachers wrote that the child was “a living reminder of the great and powerful caring force” of Rusty and Andrea.
Even those who didn’t know Rusty personally were moved by his death. “Please know that you are in my thoughts and that there are people in the Jewish community who are in grief with you,” said one post from the Hillel at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “May you be consoled with the other mourners of Zion and may Rusty’s memory be a blessing for our People and society at-large.”
The funeral began at 11 a.m. Two rabbis, Rabbi Bortz and Rabbi Mario Karpuj, spoke to a crowd of hundreds. Several of Andrea’s co-workers came in carpools arranged by her boss Hemy, who had previously explained to the non-Jewish employees the customs and traditions at a Jewish funeral. Hemy was among those who shoveled dirt onto the coffin. Mourners then gathered at the Sneidermans’ house to sit shiva, the period of mourning that can last several days. People brought food and offered condolences. Hemy introduced himself to family members, including Rusty’s brother Steven, and spoke to Rusty’s father. “My wife introduced him to me,” Donald Sneiderman later recalled. “I talked to him for about thirty seconds. I recognized the name … It was about thirty seconds or so.” The family asked Hemy to sit up front and say a prayer, which he did. He shook hands and embraced mourners.
Like Donald, a dazed Andrea would only recall some of the day’s events. Although a shiva is supposed to be a solemn and quiet affair—people are expected to speak in low tones—a house packed full of people and two confused children made for a more chaotic reality. “My children were running around like Indians during that time,” Andrea would later say in court, “not really sure what five thousand people were doing in their house. They were being cared for by most of my cousins and family and not being distracting.” She vaguely recalled Hemy being there, but didn’t know how long. Andrea described the days after her husband’s murder as being one long blur of activity and crowds and little time to properly grieve, much less process the surreal notion that she was in the middle of a murder case. “I was,” she later said, “in a fairly catatonic state.”
Rusty’s brother, Steven, and Steven’s wife, Lisa, spent time with Andrea and other relatives, sharing memories of Rusty as they went through old photo albums showing pictures of Rusty and Andrea when they were dating, their honeymoon, and the arrival of their children. Lisa described Rusty to the Cleveland Jewish News as “Harvard-educated, brilliant, very caring and loving and super-ethical,” and said, “He’s not the kind of person who ever got in any trouble, even as a kid.”
The day of the funeral, while everybody was at the cemetery, police searched the Sneiderman house again, still trying to find Rusty’s wallet. Andrea said he sometimes kept it tucked away in places she didn’t know about. Instead of obtaining another search warrant, Thompson reached an agreement with Andrea that the search would be conducted while everybody was away to avoid disruption. A neighbor was assigned to monitor police to ensure that nothing that Andrea deemed inappropriate was taken. “Andrea set the ground rules,” Thompson later said.
The department was eager to keep relations with Andrea good and lines of communication open. But it wasn’t an ideal way to operate. With Thompson and Cortellino turned away from the house the first night, then given resistance the next night about taking the computer, “It did not arouse my suspicions,” Thompson later recalled. “It irritated me that they weren’t cooperating.”