Steinberg Smoked Cocaine as Girl, 6, Died, Mate Says

As the 6-year-old girl they raised lay unconscious on the bathroom floor, Joel Steinberg smoked cocaine and said, “I knocked her down and she didn’t want to get up again,” Hedda Nussbaum testified today.

Steinberg, who had accused the girl and a baby boy they were raising of trying to put him into a trance by staring at him, also told Nussbaum, “The staring business had gotten to be too much,” she said in her second day of testimony.

Steinberg, 47, is accused of beating the girl, Lisa, to death on Nov. 2, 1987.

Nussbaum testified today that Steinberg sat in the bedroom early that morning, free-basing cocaine while Lisa lay motionless on the floor of the bathroom.

Not Breathing

Nussbaum, 46, Steinberg’s lover, testified that Steinberg went into the bathroom sometime after 4 a.m. Suddenly he screamed frantically, “She stopped breathing!” and he carried Lisa’s limp body into the bedroom, where he tried to revive her, Nussbaum said.

Nussbaum said she begged him for permission to call paramedics for help, but Steinberg insisted, “Give me a chance first!”

Finally, at 6:30 a.m., Nussbaum called 911. The delay cost Lisa Steinberg her life, prosecutors say.

Authorities accuse Steinberg of striking the fatal blow before 7 p.m. the night before, then leaving their Greenwich Village apartment to dine with a friend.

Nussbaum, a former children’s book editor at Random House, was initially arrested with Steinberg but has not been charged in the case because prosecutors believe Steinberg beat her into submission.

Battered Face

Nussbaum, who still limps slightly and whose face shows the signs of battering despite extensive reconstructive surgery, described nine years of beatings that allegedly turned her into an obedient zombie controlled by Steinberg.

In testimony that the judge instructed the jury was only to demonstrate Nussbaum’s state of mind, she said Steinberg hit her for the first time in 1978, giving her a black eye that caused her to see “flashes of light in front of the eye.” She said she went to a hospital but did not identify Steinberg as the one who hit her.

In February, 1981, she said, he struck her, injuring her spleen and requiring a splenectomy. “I had to sit up all night, the pain was getting so bad.”

Went to Hospital Secretly

She went to a hospital alone, without waking Steinberg, because “I thought that he would probably stop me from going.”

She testified that at least once she told doctors her injuries were the result of her boyfriend striking her, but then asked them to erase the information from hospital records to “protect Joel.”

Steinberg is on trial in state Supreme Court, charged with second-degree murder in a case that has become a national symbol of child abuse and wife battering.