- Jurors are scheduled to return to a Manhattan courtroom on Monday to decide Tyrese Haspil’s fate.
- Haspil said his own extreme emotional upset led him to brutally murder tech company CEO Fahim Saleh.
- But prosecutors said Haspil’s activity on dating apps undermines that claim.
A Manhattan jury is about to decide the fate of Tyrese Haspil, the 25-year-old former personal assistant on trial for the brutal murder of his boss, tech CEO Fahim Saleh.
Haspil’s lawyers, whose trial is ongoing in New York State Supreme Court, have argued that he was so in love with his girlfriend and feared she would abandon him that he fell into a state of extreme mental turmoil and killed Saleh.
But prosecutors said Haspil had been using the popular dating app Bumble while on dates with his girlfriend, trying to undermine claims he was crazy with love for her at the time of the murder.
In his closing arguments, public defender Sam Roberts argued that Haspil deserved a “careful and comprehensive consideration” by the jury of why he killed his former boss, whose family sat calmly in the courtroom.
“Why did Tyrese do this horrific and irreparable thing? Why? That’s the only big question,” Roberts told jurors, arguing his client suffered from Extremely Emotional Disorder (EED).
If the jury accepts this, Haspil will be found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and his sentence will be significantly reduced.
Saleh was the CEO of Gokada, a Nigeria-based ride-hailing and delivery service.
Saleh’s cousin discovered his body decapitated and dismembered in his $2.4 million Lower Manhattan apartment on July 14, 2020.
Saleh’s former personal assistant, Haspil, admitted after his arrest that he had stabbed Saleh to death to conceal the embezzlement of $400,000. And cut him into six pieces To hide his body.
Roberts tried to persuade the jury that for Haspil, the thought of being dumped by his lover was “more painful than the thought of killing this innocent person.” Moved by his “first real relationship” with Marine Chauveau, whose visa had expired and who was returning to France, Haspil was forced to embezzle his boss’s money to lavish gifts on her birthday.
“No matter how twisted it may seem to us, to Tyrese the Marines were his whole world,” Roberts said.
Haspil embezzled from Saleh for years, but Saleh gave him opportunities to pay back the money without police involvement. Roberts told jurors that Haspil’s embezzlement spiked when she began her relationship with Saleh, and showed them a graph showing the history of the embezzlement.
Roberts said Haspil was in an extremely mentally unstable state and believed murder was his only way out, so he could “spend some more time” with his girlfriend before serving time in prison on embezzlement charges.
When it was the defense’s turn to make closing arguments, prosecutor Linda Ford burst the love bubble.
Ford alleged that not only had Haspil planned the murder months in advance, but that he also used Bumble at a time when he was obsessed with his girlfriend.
“This is about his lifestyle,” Ford said, noting that Haspil was living in a penthouse and traveling by helicopter before he met Chauveau. “This is not about birthday parties. This is about the murder of Fahim Saleh.”
After closing arguments, Judge April Neubauer told jurors they would begin deliberations Monday morning.
