A New York man was convicted of killing his own mother and cutting off her head before posing for a selfie in 2016.
26-year-old Bahsid McLean was found guilty in November 2016 of second-degree murder and unlawful dissection of a human being in the gruesome murder of his mother, Tanya Byrd. According to trial testimony, McLean stabbed his mother to death in her apartment on February 25, 2013.
“The defendant fatally stabbed his mother and then chillingly took photos with her mutilated corpse. A jury found him guilty of murder for these horrific acts and now he will serve the maximum sentence in prison,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark said in a statement.
McLean confessed to the sickening crime after police found a shower curtain missing at his apartment, which wreaked of bleach. The shower curtain was later found wrapped around his mom’s body parts in one of the bags dumped on the curb for collection.
McLean, whose Twitter handle is @killtanyabyrd, stabbed his mother to death in the bedroom of the apartment they shared on either Sunday night or Monday morning. After he dissected his mother’s body he took a “selfie” photo with her severed head. He then went to a hardware store to buy a two-foot power saw, which he used to chop up his mother’s body.
He discarded her remains in garbage bags inside suitcases, which he dumped in his neighborhood after telling a friend he wanted to take the trash out.
It is not clear whether McLean’s seven-year-old brother Nasyr, who has Down’s syndrome, was home.
The gruesome pictures, discovered by cops on his cell phone, and an initial confession led to McLean’s murder charge.
Byrd’s sister Cassandra McLean told said that the mother-of-three had caught McLean scouring the Internet for how to tips on covering up a murder. Hpe later created a MySpace page called “Kill the bitch Tanya.”
Officials said McLean was furious with his mother after she told him he wasn’t a good father and because she “wanted him to grow up and move out and be a man.”
His aunt said her nephew harbored resentment towards his mom after he was placed in a foster home while she battled a drug problem. He came back to live with her when he was 18. He was also suspected of abusing his younger brother, whose body began displaying bruises.
His friend, 26-year-old William Harris, allegedly helped him get rid of the body. The pair were reportedly caught on surveillance video at a nearby hardware store where they bought a power saw with cash.
Investigators scoured through piles of trash in the South Bronx neighborhood after a horrified dog-walker discovered the human remains in a travel bag at around 4:30am and called police.
One-by-one, Byrd’s decapitated head, right leg, torso and hands have been unearthed in the area around Eagle Avenue, 158th Street, 156th Street and Cauldwell Avenue.
Some of Byrd’s body parts were still wearing the clothes she was in when she was slaughtered.
A neighbor said, “She was afraid of that boy… He was a hellion.”
Byrd was sometimes frightened of her son but loved him, a relative who didn’t want to be named said. “He’s acted out in violent ways before, but I never thought he could do something like this. Not in a million years.”
McLean’s attorney, Lynn Calvacca, reportedly argued that her client was mentally ill. But prosecutors argued that the murder was cold-blooded and that McLean knew exactly what he was doing.
“Does this look like someone who knows what he is doing is wrong?” Calvacca asked the court as she held up a photo of a smiling McLean posing with his mother’s severed head.
Criminal Court Judge Jeanette Rodriguez-Morick sentenced McLean to 25 years to life behind bars.
Ironically, McLean’s son, Zamair, was murdered a year later in January 2017 by his ex-wife, Zarah Coombs. She fatally beat her 4-year-old son because he dropped an egg in their Brownsville apartment. The boy had gotten the egg when she refused to get him food.
She beat the boy with two of her three other kids in the apartment.
The former daycare worker waited for 20 minutes before calling 911. Cops found the battered boy foaming at the mouth and stowed inside a water-filled plastic bin.
She was sentenced May 2, 2018 to 17 years in prison.
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