A tech CEO’s personal assistant claims he beheaded his boss in a crime of passion, his attorney argued Friday.
Tyrese Haspil, 25, was desperate to cover his tracks after stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employer and didn’t want his French girlfriend, Marine Chaveuz, to find out and leave him, according to his defense.
This motivated Haspil to force his way into the $2.4 million Lower East Side apartment of Fahim Saleh, 33, Taser him then stab him to death, defense attorney Sam Roberts told jurors at Manhattan Supreme Court.
Roberts, is trying to convince a 12-person jury Haspil suffered from “extreme emotional disturbance,” which led him to kill.
Haspil worried he would be “abandoned” if Chaveuz found out about the $400,000 he had stolen, so decided his only two options were “suicide or homicide,” and chose the latter, according to prosecutors.
Saleh, a venture capitalist and the CEO of Nigeria-based motorbike startup Gokada, confronted Haspil about missing money in January 2020 after learning $90,000 disappeared from a corporate spending account.
The money was traced back to Haspil, but Saleh declined to press charges against the man he saw as his protégé and allowed him to pay him back through a payment plan.
However, Haspil continued to steal from Saleh’s company through a Paypal account, but was again found out.
With the threat of prosecution looming, Haspil decided to carefully research and plan how to get away with murder, prosecutors say.
“Over this period of time, he was planning not only to commit the homicide but to get away with it …To cover it up and how to erase his debt and prevent Fahim Saleh from testifying in criminal proceedings,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Linda Ford told the court.
Sources told The Post at the time Haspil had allegedly used Saleh’s credit cards to pay for rides to and from the Home Depot store on West 23rd Street to buy supplies to clean up the murder.
Prosecutors gave the jury a play-by-play of Saleh’s alleged killing.
They said Haspil, wearing a mask, zapped Saleh with a Taser, stabbed him then dismembered the body a day later, cutting off the victim’s head.
After the killing Haspil vacuumed, but his cleanup wasn’t thorough enough and he didn’t to suck up a single “anti-felon disk” identification tag, which was recovered at the scene.
The disk contained a unique number matched to the Taser that Haspil ordered to his Brooklyn address a month before the murder, prosecutors claimed.
Saleh’s body was discovered by his cousin, who found his torso exposed in the living room alongside construction bags when she went in to check on him, after she had not heard from him for a few days.
Despite his alleged dedication to Chaveuz, Haspil was spotted two days after the murder with a mystery woman strolling through Noho and buying a bouquet of birthday balloons, sources said.
Prosecutors said Haspil was planning a birthday party for his new girlfriend at a loft-like Airbnb on Crosby St, where he showered her with cakes and luxury items.
These included a pricey leather APC tote bag, a beige Christian Louboutin shopping bag and a box of shoes which were recovered by police, all allegedly bought on his dead boss’ dime.
Haspil has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges which carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years to life behind bars if he is convicted.
His attorneys hope a jury will instead opt for convicting him of manslaughter due to his “emotionally disturbed” defense, which carries a lighter sentence of five to 25 years.
Roberts said Haspil’s life has been “marked by trauma,” beginning with a tough childhood where he was the victim of years of abuse by his schizophrenic mother.
She is said to have kept him locked inside a bedroom and beat him.
Haspil’s actions “might not be rational to us,” claimed Roberts, “but from his point of view, in his shoes, at that time, it made some sort of sense to him.”
