Love redeems house of horror
New family makes home in Nixzmary's old rooms
BY ADAM LISBERGDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
-->Unspeakable things once happened in the second-floor Brooklyn apartment where 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown died.
But a year later, another young family has banished the ghosts from the apartment, living there with a joy and love that Nixzmary never knew.
"There's a warmth when you enter the door," said Nicole Sutton, 28, who lives in the bright, airy Bedford-Stuyvesant unit with her three children - including a 7-year-old daughter named Destiny who has Nixzmary's old room.
Sutton signed the lease before she learned of the apartment's deadly past from a newspaper story. She was rattled but undeterred, figuring if she didn't take it, someone else would.
"It's a beautiful apartment. It's spacious. It's quiet. I love it," Sutton told the Daily News inside the three-bedroom flat, as sons Shomari, 11, and Keyshaun, 3, played with their Christmas presents near the tree.
Some neighbors have stopped her to ask if she's scared to live there. Some friends are too squeamish to come over. And Sutton purposely enrolled the children in a different school than Nixzmary attended.
Shomari has seen pictures of his Greene Ave. building on television and has a dim idea that something once happened there. Destiny and Keyshaun don't know at all. Sutton wants to keep it that way for as long as she can.
The details of what went on there are gruesome: Nixzmary's mother and stepfather allegedly beat and tortured her, forcing her to use a cat litter box in the bedroom instead of a toilet.
They are charged with murder after her stepfather allegedly slammed her head into the bathtub and held her under freezing water, then threw her into the bedroom to die on Jan. 11, as her mother did nothing to help.
The apartment today bears no trace of those horrors. Destiny's room is full of dolls and toys, with clothes neatly stacked and shoes lined up against the wall; the bathroom is bright and clean.
"My mother said, 'Even if a person does believe in spirits, what you're putting into this apartment is what wasn't here,'" Sutton said. "'The love and affection that they were missing, you're putting in there. You're making it complete.'"
The apartment stood vacant for eight months before Sutton moved in Aug. 1. Cops sealed it for a while, then former owner Chaim Schwartz renovated it - and at least one potential tenant refused to move in after learning of its history.
"That apartment was bad," Schwartz said. "I had to do a lot of renovations there."
Schwartz sold the three-story building last month for $750,000, making a $240,000 profit on his three-year investment.
New owner Elizabeth Emono, who with her husband Edward served probation for car insurance fraud and later filed for bankruptcy, bought the building for no money down.
"We had no idea of that type of thing happening in that building before we purchased it," Edward Emono said in a brief phone interview.
Today, the front door is covered with shimmery green Christmas wrapping paper and candy canes that Sutton hung to "liven it up," she said.
She put another Christmas display on the second-floor landing, with a tiny "Merry Christmas, Nixzmary" inscription on the bottom.
"Mommy, who's Nixzmary?" Destiny asked the other day, when she saw a visitor reading the inscription.
"It's a long story," Sutton said. "I'll tell you someday."