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“She had enjoyed the day away,” Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Jessica Gomperts said, “but once she returned home at about 11 p.m., trouble started again…. He was yelling and nasty, and she didn’t want to deal with it.”
It was the continuation of a nightmare-come-true, Gomperts said, one that would lead to a 5½-hour standoff between her husband and a SWAT team — and find her and her child carried to safety by firefighters who raised a ladder to the bathroom window.
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Jessica Gomperts (STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. MIraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
Spalnick “first removed the hinges from the door of the master bedroom with a power drill, where she had gone for refuge,” Gomperts said. “Once he had removed the door, he punched her in the eye.”
His wife moved to another bedroom, the assistant prosecutor said, but he did the same thing.
Moments after the terrified woman called 911, “the door came flying into the room,” Gomperts said. “He had kicked it in, and now he punched her in the face while the baby was in her arms.”
She put the child down, but Spalnick swatted him before returning his attention to his wife — punching her over and over, the assistant prosecutor told jurors.
Her nose was bleeding so much by the time she reached the bathroom that she was having trouble breathing, Gomperts said.
Then she heard a knock on the second-floor window.
Mike Nasta, deputy chief of the South Hackensack Fire Department, was outside atop a 30-foot ladder. He’d been alerted by police officers who were inside talking to Spalnick in a dark apartment illuminated by flashlights.
“Shhh,” Nasta said, motioning toward her.
First, she handed him the infant, who was sent down the ladder to an ambulance. Then she climbed out.
The ambulance took both to Hackensack University Medical Center, where the woman was treated for a concussion, a broken nose, extensive contusions and scratches and severe pain, Gomperts said.
Back in the apartment stood Spalnick, a 12-inch butcher knife in each hand, she said.
“He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,” said Gomperts, repeating what a law enforcement officer involved in the standoff told CLIFFVIEW PILOT hours later.
Spalnick said “the only way anyone would leave that night was in a body bag, and they better finish him off or he’d finish his wife off once they left,” she told jurors.
He later locked himself in a bedroom, talking on and off with police before he “finally lay down his knives and surrendered” around 5 a.m., Gomperts said.
Defense attorney Bob Cherry didn’t address any of the prosecutor’s points.
Instead, he asked jurors to “listen to everything, keep an open mind, and make her prove everything.
“The prosecutor told you what she has to prove,” Cherry said. “You will see what happens during the course of the trial, and at the end must make a decision.”
Cherry described himself as “a simple country lawyer … not as eloquent as the prosecutor. “But she has to prove it,” he told jurors. “You have to listen and decide what the facts are.”
Spalnick is charged with one count of attempted serious bodily injury against his wife, one count of endangering the welfare of a child, one count of weapons possession with the intent to harm another, and one count of aggravated assault on a police officer.
Cherry last week asked Superior Court Judge James J. Guida to find that Spalnick suffered from “diminished capacity” at the time of the standoff, meaning he could not “form an intent” to cause harm.
Guida denied the motion (SEE: Judge rejects ‘diminished’ defense in South Hackensack standoff) .
The trial is was to resume this morning at 10.
STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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