Bx Jury Gets Case of Accused Matricidal Maniac

By NAAFUA AKUMAH & RENEE SAFF

The jury in the trial of a 26-year-old man accused of murdering his mother, dismembering his body and posing for a selfie with her dismembered head began deliberations on Thursday afternoon.

The defendant, Bahsid McLean, fell asleep, snored loudly, and even took to drawing during the trial’s closing arguments as his lawyers in closing statements tried arguing to the jury that McLean, who allegedly stabbed his 52-year old mother twice in the neck and then hacked apart her body with a two-foot Black & Decker jigsaw, is mentally ill and did not understand right from wrong.

Throughout the case, McLean wore a plastic garbage bag because he kept wetting himself, and he even showed up once in a hazardous materials suit.

“He has a death sentence hanging over his head, and he’s sitting in the court room singing and drawing,” the defense said. McLean’s lawyer kept reiterating that this is “not a normal case,” given the defendant’s history of mental illness. He has been in and out of mental hospitals since he was 6-years old and reported hearing voices in his head since the age of 10. McLean thought that “angels would descend and protect him.”

McLean killed his mother and then went to a hardware store and bought a power saw to cut up her body, police said. Before hacking up her body and packing her remains into bin bags, he snapped a selfie of himself smirking while holding up his mother’s head as a trophy. McLean called the police to report his mother as a missing person. Her body was found in bin bags inside four different suitcases that were dumped around the neighborhood.

The prosecution’s claim is that McLean was fully aware of what he was doing, and killed his mother in a clear, calculated way, citing a recording where McLean admits that, “I knew stabbing her in the neck will kill her.”

“The reason why he killed his mom was because she wanted him to better his life, get a job and to be a good father to his son,” the prosecution said.

After killing his mother, McLean inserted his SIM card into her cellphone, to prevent people from calling her. When cops showed up and asked McLean what his mother looked like, he avoided showing them the selfie with her severed head.

McLean originally tried blaming his friend, William Harris – who helped McLean get rid of his mother’s body, for killing his mother. Eventually, he admitted to committing the murder but said that “it wasn’t his fault.”