Actor kills mother for being a ‘sinner’
NEW YORK, USA – New York police said today that a Haitian American actor here was convinced that his church-going, Haitian-born mother was possessed by Satan when he hacked her to death with a three-foot sword as she knelt in their apartment.
Police said Michael Brea, 31, told doctors that he “saw the Devil, and “the Devil was somehow in [his ]mother”.
Yannick Brea, 55, was found kneeling — as if offering a final prayer — after she was killed during her son’s diatribe about repentance, police said.
“Sinner! Sinner!” neighbours and police quoted Brea, who once appeared on “Ugly Betty” and the movie “Step Up 3D”, as saying. “You never accepted Jesus!”
Police said Brea, who was not working, is charged with murder for the brutal slaying of his mother.
“Michael couldn’t pay his bills,” his friend Sylvan Benoit said. “I think [the murder] happened because of stress over money.”
Police said the suspect, still in full “fire and brimstone” babble when carried out on a stretcher, was still clutching his Bible and a Masonic ceremonial sword.
“He yelled, ‘The greatest architect in the universe!’” — a term sometimes used by Masons for God — while he was being taken away,” neighbour Sydney Clare, 15, told reporters. “He looked crazy.”
Police said they discovered the victim with multiple gashes to her head inside the blood-spattered bathroom.
Clare, whose father owns the building, said his dad gave four cops permission to break down the front door.
“They just kept saying protocol this and protocol that,” Sydney added. “Now a woman’s dead who should be alive if only the police would have listened.”
Brea’s uncle, Martial Brea, said his nephew apparently took the ceremonial sword with him while leaving a Masons meeting late Monday night. He said his nephew was typically a smart, quiet man.
“Something happened that made him do it,” Martial Brea said. “The Devil entered him.”
The victim was described as a hardworking, family-oriented Haitian immigrant who arrived in the US 40 years ago.
She was devoted to her twin sons, who shared her Brooklyn apartment.
Yannick Brea was a hotel worker who survived the 9/11 attacks, leaving her job at the World Trade Centre Marriott before the twin towers collapsed, neighbours said.
Michael Brea had no prior arrests, and police had no record of any previous disturbances at the Brooklyn apartment.