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Rita Rabinowitz took her daughter's hand, holding tight as the DVD began to play before a crowded, hushed courtroom. And there, as she sat watching, she saw her husband's death just as he saw it that night -- through his eyes, from the front of the limousine in which he died.
Silence. A crash. And then it was over. A man's life -- and a little girl's life, Katie Flynn, all of 7 years old -- had ended.
After she sat in the courtroom at the trial of Martin Heidgen, who is charged with Katie's and Stanley's deaths, Rita sat and talked to me about her husband's life. It was only fitting: On a day when she saw how he died, she wanted to remember his life.
They had lived together for nine months as man and wife.
She called him Snookums.
He called her Sweetums.
Theirs was a love story, a story worth remembering, especially as the last sounds and images Stanley would ever see rolled across the screen in the courtroom Tuesday.
Fleeting images are far too often what passes for the whole of a life in criminal courtrooms.
Blink.
Stanley Rabinowitz is going about his business. He's born in Brooklyn, schooled, married, a father, a sailor, married again, to Rita, and living in Farmingdale.
Blink.
He's gone, through no fault of his own, and made famous by images that have nothing to do with who he was or how he lived -- images that tell us nothing about the man he was.
Rabinowitz was 59 when he and Katie died on the Meadowbrook Parkway. Both families find some solace in that neither died alone.
"She didn't have to leave that car by herself to go to heaven," one of Katie's aunts told Rita, as they shared sunshine outside the courthouse.
"Katie couldn't have picked a better companion," Rita replied, smiling. "Stan had a way with children. I can see him taking her by the hand."
Stan also had a way with words, which is how this love story began.
"I am an honest, straightforward gentleman," he wrote in a personal ad that ran on an Internet dating service sometime, Rita believes, back in 2000.
He was divorced; she was divorcing and both were looking for someone special.
Rita went to the AOL personals. She scrolled right past a host of "handsome," "talented" and obviously -- to her, at least -- conceited men.
And then she got to Stan. He was as straightforward in describing his love for his two sons, Keith and Nolan, as he was in describing himself.
"This is a good man," Rita decided. So she e-mailed him.
"You sound too good to be true," she wrote.
"I fell in love with his words," she told me. "And then, I fell in love with his voice. We clicked at hello."
For their first date, they took separate cars to a diner for dinner. Things went so well, Rita suggested they travel to another place so she could treat him to a dessert of flavored coffee or pastry.
They went to their separate cars, but Rita lost Stan on Hempstead Turnpike. Rita had no cell phone. She circled back to the diner, looking for Stan.
Stan, meanwhile, was hunting for her. Eventually, he called her house from his cell phone and left a message.
"I don't want it to end," he said, "not like this."
And it didn't. They got dessert; and, in 2005, they got married, with Stan's two sons as best men and Rita's only daughter, Michelle, as maid of honor.
Rita's grandchildren would come to call her husband "Stanpa," unless it was Christmas. Then, he was "Stan-ta Claus."
That's just a small piece of Stan's life, which no DVD in any courtroom could capture.
In her heart, Rita doesn't worry about losing Stan. She still wears her wedding ring.
She's Italian. He was Jewish. The ring is an Irish Claddagh, with two hands clasping a heart.
The hands open, revealing a one-word inscription:
ETERNITY.
joye.brown@newsday.com
For more about Rabinowitz, go to the memorial Web site www.stanleyerabinowitz.com.
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