Bahsid McLean, 26, is standing trial charged with murdering his mother, Tanya Byrd, 52, at their Morrisania apartment on 26 February 2013.
McLean allegedly stabbed his 52-year-old mother after she told him he was a bad father.
McLean then dismembered his mother with a power saw and then took a selfie with her severed head.
Police said that after McLean killed his mother he then went to a hardware store and bought a power saw to carve up her body before calling the police to report his dead mother as ‘missing’.
His defence lawyer has told a court he was mentally ill at the time of the act and didn’t know right from wrong.
His defence team are arguing that jurors should acquit McLean by reason of mental defect or disease, claiming he has had voices in his head since he was a child.
During an opening statement at McLean’s trial in Bronx Supreme Court his attorney Lynn Calvacca, while holding up a photo of a smirking Bahsid McLean posing with his mother’s disembodied head, Â told the court “Does this look like someone who knows what he is doing is wrong?”
Prosecutors called the killing ‘cold-blooded’, arguing McLean knew exactly what he was doing when he carried out the killing.
Among the witnesses who have testified against McLean was a man who stumbled on part of the victim’s body as he walked his dog in the middle of the night. The man said his dog pulled him towards a suitcase in which he found dismembered body parts.
Cassandra McLean, 53, the sister of the deceased, told the New York Daily News that her nephew was a danger to society and should be jailed for life. “If he could do that to his own mother, imagine what he could do to a stranger. I don’t hate him I pity him,” she told the paper.
The trial continues.
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