Fearing that his French girlfriend named Marine Chaveuz would leave him if she got to know about his deeds, a man identified as Tyrese Haspil (25) beheaded a tech CEO, according to a report by New York Post.
In his desperate attempts to keep his girlfriend at bay from knowing that he had stolen about $400,000 from his employer Fahim Saleh (33), Haspil tried to clean out his evidence and remove a witness by killing Saleh.
According to the publication, defense attorney Sam Roberts at the Manhattan Supreme Court, while trying to convince a 12-judge bench that Haspil's deeds was due to his extreme emotional disturbance, said that Haspil forcibly entered Saleh's Lower East Side apartment, worth about $2.4 million, and stabbed Saleh to death.
Fearing that Chaveuz would leave him if it came to her knowledge that he had stolen money, Haspil assumed he had only two options—suicide or homicide—and chose the latter.
According to the publication, Saleh, who had confronted Haspil about the stolen money after $90,000 vanished from his corporate account in January 2020, was a venture capitalist and also the CEO of a Nigeria-based motorbike startup—Gokada.
Probe into the matter revealed that Haspil was the culprit but, surprisingly Saleh who saw him as a 'protege' decided not to file a case against him and came up with a payment plan allowing Haspil to pay back the stolen money.
According to New York Post, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Linda Ford told the court, "Over this period of time, he was planning not only to commit the homicide but to get away with it …To cover it up and how to erase his debt and prevent Fahim Saleh from testifying in criminal proceedings."
With the aim to commit murder and then clean up his crime scene, Haspil used Saleh's credit cards to pay for travelling from and to department stores to purchase necessary items needed to execute his plan.
According to the publication, prosecutors gave a timeline of the murder, saying that Haspil stabbed Saleh to death and then a day later, dismembered his body after beheading him.
They also said that after killing Saleh, though Haspil vacuumed the crime scene, his cleaning wasn't thorough which led to the finding of an evidence at the crime scene - an 'anti-felon disk' ID tag.
The number written on the disk led to the fact that it was the from one of the purchases made by Haspil while planning the murder.
According to New York Post, a cousin of Saleh who had visited his house after she hadn't heard from him for several days, discovered his headless body.
Two days later, Haspil was spotted buying birthday balloons with a woman. Haspil was planning a birthday party for another woman at an Airbnb on Crosby St., prosecutors claimed, adding that he also gifted the woman cakes and luxury items - an APC tote bag, a Christian Louboutin shopping bag, and a box of shoes.
All these gift items were seized by the police in presumption that they were purchased using Saleh's stolen money.
Haspil's defence attorney hoped that the bench, keeping in consideration his 'emotionally disturbed' state, would term the homicide a case of manslaughter, which has a comparatively lighter sentence of five to 25 years.
According to the publication, trying to justify his deeds, Roberts said that Haspil's life had been marked with trauma as he has had a tough childhood due to abuse at the hands of his schizophrenic mother.