A Long Island mother accused in the case of a hacked-up married couple allegedly kicked the female victim as she choked on her own blood – then bashed her head with a meat tenderizer.
The grisly new details emerged Monday as two suspects out of a crew of four were arraigned on hefty new charges in the double murder — which infamously included the victims’ severed heads and limbs strewn around local parks.
A previous robbery has been tied to the slayings — with the two victims having helped the suspects plan the earlier heist and then somehow running afoul of them, authorities revealed Monday.
Accused murderous mom Alexis Nieves, 33, was ordered held on $1 million cash bond — and suspected accomplice Jeffrey Mackey, 38, remanded — as a Suffolk County prosecutor detailed their alleged roles in the killings at the hearing.
“After the female victim in this case, Donna Conneely, had been stabbed by Ms. Nieves’ codefendant, Mr. Mackey, [Nieves] kicked Donna Conneely as she was gasping for air, choking on her own blood,’’ Assistant District Attorney Francis Schroeder told the judge.
“Then [Nieves] kicked her and hit her with a hammer, a meat tenderizer, multiple times in the head and stabbed her repeatedly in the back until she died.”
As for Mackey, “This defendant is charged with repeatedly stabbing … Malcolm Craig Brown, then turned towards [Brown’s] wife, Donna Conneely, repeatedly stabbing her in the neck and then proceeded to strangle her and then turn her over to Ms. Nieves,’’ the ADA said.
Mackey allegedly used the same blade in the slayings as the one he wielded earlier during a gas-station heist.
“Previously, he used a a knife in a robbery of a Valero gas station, [and] he used the same knife in the murder, and evidence will show how the robbery is connected and actually serves as the motive for the murders,” Schroeder said.
The double slaying shocked the region as the victims’ heads and limbs began turning up around Suffolk County in late February — an apparent attempt by the suspects to hide their crime.
Mackey and Nieves were among four people charged last month with relatively lesser raps, such as concealment of a human corpse, tied to the deaths of the Westchester County victims.
The Yonkers couple’s bodies were dismembered with meat cleavers in late February at a home that at least three of the quartet had just moved into in Amityville on Long Island.
Brown and Conneely, who were “acquaintances’’ of the suspects, were believed to have been killed at the home around the same time — having unknowingly walked into a planned plot to kill them, authorities said Monday.
The couple had helped the other suspects plan the robbery, officials said.
“There was a lot of illegal conduct occurring between the victims and the defendants, which in part was the impetus for the murders, presumably,’’ said county DA Ray Tierney at a later press conference Monday.
Authorities have said the home’s sinks, showers, drains and toilets were all clogged by the suspects’ attempts to dismember and get rid of evidence from the corpses of the 53-year-old man and 59-year-old woman.
The four suspects were released with mere ankle monitors at the time of the earlier arraignments because of the state’s lenient criminal-justice reforms, sparking outcry.
The other two suspects were not in court Monday.
Tierney, asked about their status as potential suspects-turned-witnesses for the prosecution, said they would soon be arraigned on charges, although he declined to say what the raps were.
Nieves — who wore an oversized, multicolored Bart Simpson “Backwoods’’ hoodie and gray Reebok basketball shorts to court — was arraigned Monday on charges including second-degree murder.
“The evidence is strong — we have eyewitness testimony. We have video, we have phone records, we have cell-site records,’’ Schroeder told the judge.
The ADA said the same when pushing for Mackey to be held without bail on two new murder charges, as well as a robbery rap.
The pair only responded, “Yes’’ in court when asked basic questions such as their ages.
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods
