Bahsid McLean, 26, is standing trial charged with murdering his mother, Tanya Byrd, 52, at their Morrisania apartment on 26 February 2013.<\/p>\n
McLean allegedly stabbed his 52-year-old mother after she told him he was a bad father.<\/p>\n
McLean then dismembered his mother with a power saw and then took a selfie with her severed head.<\/p>\n
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’.<\/p>\n
His defence lawyer has told a court he was mentally ill at the time of the act and didn’t know right from wrong.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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, \u00a0told the court “Does this look like someone who knows what he is doing is wrong?”<\/p>\n
Prosecutors called the killing ‘cold-blooded’, arguing McLean knew exactly what he was doing when he carried out the killing.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0“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.<\/p>\n
The trial continues.<\/p>\n
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