The personal assistant to a tech company CEO claims he decapitated his boss in a fit of passion, his lawyer argued Friday.
The defense said Tyrese Haspil, 25, was desperate to cover his tracks after stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employers and did not want his French girlfriend, Marine Chavez, to find out and break up with him.
That was what motivated Haspil to break into the $2.4 million Lower East Side apartment of 33-year-old Fahim Saleh and shoot and kill him with a Taser, attorney Sam Roberts told jurors in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Roberts is trying to convince the 12-person jury that Haspil suffered from “extreme emotional instability” that led him to commit murder.
According to prosecutors, Haspil feared that Chavez would “abandon him” if he found out about the $400,000 he had stolen, so he saw his only two options as to “commit suicide or be murdered,” and chose the latter.
Saleh, a venture capitalist and CEO of Nigeria-based motorcycle startup Gokada, confronted Haspil about the missing funds in January 2020 after learning $90,000 had disappeared from the company's expense account.
The money was traced back to Haspil, but Saleh refused to press charges against the man he considered his protégé and allowed it to be repaid in installments.
However, Haspil continued to steal from Saleh's company through his PayPal account and was caught again.
With the threat of indictment looming, prosecutors say, Haspil decided to carefully research and plan how to get away with the murder charges.
“During this time, he was planning not only to commit the murder, but also to get away with it … to cover it up, to cancel his debts and to prevent Fahim Saleh from testifying at his criminal trial,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Linda Ford said in court.
At the time, sources told The Post that Haspil allegedly used Saleh's credit card to pay for travel to and from the Home Depot store on West 23rd Street to buy supplies needed to clean up the murder scene.
The prosecution gave the jury a detailed rundown of Saleh's murder.
Wearing a mask, Haspil allegedly tased Saleh, stabbed him and then decapitated the victim and dismembered his body the following day.
After the murders, Haspil vacuumed the area, but did not clean thoroughly and did not remove any of the identification on the “felon-proof disks” that were recovered at the scene.
Prosecutors alleged the disk contained a unique number that matched a Taser that Haspil ordered for his Brooklyn home a month before the murder.
Saleh's body was discovered by a cousin who went to check on him after not hearing from him for several days, finding his torso exposed in the living room next to a construction bag.
Sources said Haspil, who was allegedly devoted to Chavez, was seen strolling NoHo with a mystery woman and buying a bouquet of balloons for a birthday two days after the murder.
Prosecutors said Haspil planned a birthday party for his new girlfriend at a loft-like Airbnb on Crosby Street and gifted her cake and luxury items.
These included an expensive leather APC tote bag, a beige Christian Louboutin shopping bag and a shoe box, all of which were recovered by police, allegedly purchased with the late boss's money.
Haspil has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and faces a minimum sentence of 20 years to life in prison if convicted.
His lawyers hope that a jury will convict him of manslaughter, citing his “emotionally unstable” defense, and impose a lighter sentence of five to 25 years.
Roberts said Haspil's life had been “marked by trauma”, beginning with a tough childhood in which she suffered years of abuse from her mother, who had schizophrenia.
She allegedly locked him in her bedroom and beat him.
Roberts argued that Haspil's actions “may not seem reasonable to us, but to a certain extent they made sense given where he was at the time.”
