First off, NewsFeed knows firsthand that the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Prospect Heights is a growing, friendly community with people of all stripes and does not typically have samurai sword-wielding homicidal religious fanatics walking around. With that said, Prospect Heights is reeling after a samurai sword-wielding homicidal religious fanatic slashed his mother to death early Tuesday, according to the New York Daily News.
Michael Brea, who had a bit part on the canceled ABC series Ugly Betty, reportedly killed his mother Yannick Brea, 55, shouting that she was a “sinner” and needed to “repent,” police say. The actor apparently told doctors that he “saw the devil” and that it was in his mother. Neighbors in the apartment where the 31-year-old lived with her said they heard the grisly killing, with Brea shouting, “You never accepted Jesus.”
(Could the recession raise the crime rate?)
But neighbors also say they are angry at police because of what they say were the cops’ cavalier response to an emergency situation. “I could hear her groaning inside … She was still alive, but they wouldn’t go in,” Clinton Clare, who lives in the apartment beneath told the News.
Neighbors said the police waited an hour before entering the apartment, and that the building’s owner gave them permission to break down the door. Despite that, the police just kept knocking. “They just kept saying protocol this and protocol that,” said Gregory Clare, whose father is the building’s owner. “Now a woman’s dead who should be alive if only the police would have listened.”
(See TIME’s look at the past decade.)
Brea, who was described by his neighbors as quiet with no apparent history of mental illness, has been charged with murder and is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.