“It was a long process,” said the foreman, Ronald Souffrant, of East Flatbush.  Mr. Rodriguez admitted to detectives and prosecutors that he beat Nixzmary daily and often tied her to a chair in the month before her death, and that he pummeled her with particular force the night she died. His chief lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, argued that while Mr. Rodriguez was a child abuser, he was not a killer and that he never thought any of his beatings would cause her death. Mr. Schwartz argued that it was Ms. Santiago who struck the blow that killed Nixzmary.  When Mr. Souffrant declared Mr. Rodriguez not guilty of murder, the defendant looked down. One of his lawyers, Barry Deonarine, put an arm around his shoulder.  Mr. Rodriguez, a slight man clad in the same ribbed blue sweater he wore through most of the trial, continued to look down as the foreman read the rest of the 12 verdicts. Most were guilty, including convictions for endangering the welfare of a child and unlawful imprisonment that could add a few years to his sentence. Eventually, Mr. Rodriguez closed his eyes.  Mr. Schwartz said his client’s first words after the verdicts were, “Thank you.”  Afterward, the lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, declined to say whether she was satisfied. “The bottom line is that the jury has spoken,” she said. Another law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said with a shrug, “It could be worse.”  Mr. Schwartz, who complained throughout the trial that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence, called the verdict “rewarding, given what we had to work with,” but added that Mr. Rodriguez’s convictions were “unconscionable, because the prosecutors cheated.” He vowed to appeal.  Nixzmary lived and died in a three-bedroom apartment on Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant with her mother, her stepfather and five half-siblings.  At the trial, a portrait emerged of a poor family plunged into chaos after Ms. Santiago had a miscarriage in late November 2005, less than a year after giving birth to her sixth child.  The parents stopped sending the children to school regularly. Mr. Rodriguez lost his job as a security guard. Mr. Rodriguez, who did not testify, had told detectives he began to beat Nixzmary daily and to tie her to a chair with duct tape, rope and bungee cords because she was trying to harm her siblings and destroying the family’s limited food supplies.  Nixzmary’s injuries did not escape the notice of her teachers on the rare occasions she came to school. They notified the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which sent workers to the family’s home several times in early January 2006 but failed to make meaningful contact with the family, in part because Mr. Rodriguez was unreceptive.  On Jan. 10, 2006, the welfare agency assigned case workers to visit the home after hours, but the case workers decided to wait till the morning.  Before dawn on Jan. 11, Ms. Santiago woke an upstairs neighbor and asked her to call 911, saying that Nixzmary had drowned. Paramedics found her dead on the floor, with black eyes and most of her rail-thin body covered with cuts and bruises in various stages of healing. An autopsy revealed that she died of cranial bleeding caused by blows to the head.  In the hours that followed, Mr. Rodriguez gave a series of statements to detectives and prosecutors in which he said that on the last night of Nixzmary’s life, she got in trouble for jamming his computer printer with toys and for taking a snack from the refrigerator — yogurt or pudding — without permission. He said he had pounded her with his hands, demanding to know why she was so destructive, and had shoved her head under a cold bathtub faucet.  When he was done, he said, he feared he had beaten her more seriously that night than he ever had before, that she looked “more pale than any other day,” would not meet his gaze and appeared “dazed out.” He said that after beating her, he left her moaning and went to his room, and that when his wife told him she was concerned that Nixzmary was having trouble breathing, he told her not to worry because “I thought it was just one of her scams.”  After reports that caseworkers missed multiple opportunities to intervene and save Nixzmary, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared, “We, as a city, have failed this child.” The city overhauled the Administration for Children’s Services, firing more than a dozen officials at the agency and putting new safeguards in place.  At the trial, prosecutors relied heavily on Mr. Rodriguez’s statements and on visceral visual aids: photos of Nixzmary’s savaged body, ruined tokens of innocence like a bloodstained Donald Duck pillow, the school chair and the duct tape that bound her in it, and the litter box she was forced to use when locked in her room.  Mr. Schwartz portrayed Mr. Rodriguez as a hard-working, caring father and Ms. Santiago as an unstable, erratic woman who had had children by four different men by the time she was 26. After her miscarriage, Mr. Schwartz said, Ms. Santiago grew violent, beating Nixzmary badly enough to require stitches.  The trial drew about a half a dozen die-hard attendees who came to court every day, often carrying photographs of Nixzmary. None seemed happy with the outcome. Awilda Cordero, a victim-rights advocate who had befriended Nixzmary’s maternal grandmother and took her side against Mr. Rodriguez, called the acquittal on the murder charge “a shock.”  “He always got away with beating her up and hurting her,” Ms. Cordero said, sobbing. “Now he got away with murder.”  An article on Wednesday about the conviction of Cesar Rodriguez for killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown, misstated the number of bedrooms in the family’s apartment on Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Nixzmary was found beaten to death. It has three bedrooms, not two.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Stepfather Is Found Guilty In Death of 7-Year-Old Girl. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The stepfather of Nixzmary Brown was convicted in the fatal 2006 beating, which was inflicted as punishment for stealing a snack and jamming a computer printer with toys.