The Staten Island teen accused of beheading his mom’s boyfriend allegedly showed his little sister the mutilated body — then asked if she wanted their mother to live.
“She said, ‘Are you gonna hurt mom?’ ” the suspect’s weeping mother, Alicia Zayas, said of her 16-year-old daughter Bri’s encounter with her blood-soaked son, Damien Hurstel, in the Monday horror.
“And he said, ‘Do you want her to live?’
“And she said, ‘Yes, please.’
“He said, ‘Okay, she’ll live.’ ”
Bri then asked her brother if she could leave the blood-spattered bathroom where, sources said, the killer removed some of Anthony Casalaspro’s brain with a spoon. Casalaspro was the mother’s live-in boyfriend.
“Are you gonna tell mom?” Damien then asked his sister.
“No,” she replied, according to a heartbroken Zayas, who spoke exclusively to The Post Friday in a 30-minute sitdown in the office of her attorneys’ Mark Fonte and Louis Gelormino.
Bri fled, hid behind a backyard shed and immediately phoned her mother.
“She called me scared,” the 39-year-old Zayas recalled. “I could hear it in her voice. I said, ‘Are you somewhere safe?’
“She said, ‘Damien killed Anthony, and he doesn’t have a head.’ ”
Cops said Damien, 19, confessed to stabbing Casalaspro, 45, and sawing off his head inside the family’s Cary Avenue home in West Brighton. He faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.
A photo of the grisly scene shows the severed head lying next to the corpse, shirtless and clad in red briefs, inside a walk-in shower. On the floor nearby is a bowl and a saw. A plastic sauce ladle lies on the victim’s chest, while the handle of a silver-colored spoon sticks out of the dismembered skull.
A desperate, panicked Zayas raced home to find Bri. Before she rushed into the house, where the front door was wide open, she told her daughter, “If you don’t hear from me in two minutes, you need to call 911. Tell them to come quickly.”
The terrified mom walked upstairs with her keys in her hand and entered her family’s apartment.
“There’s blood everywhere,” she recalled. Damien was in the kitchen, wearing a disturbing expression.
“His eyes looked different,” she recalled. “He has light eyes. The eyes looked dark. It looked weird. I said ‘Damien, what’s going on? What’s wrong, honey? What are you doing?’ ”
“Cleaning,” Damien told his mother flatly, “as if he’s cleaning dishes, like it’s normal.”
She then asked where Casalaspro was and her son said he was in the bathroom. But “you don’t want to go in there,’” he chillingly warned.
“I said, ‘Well, Damien, I have to go in there. I have to see Anthony.’ ”
The frightened mom slowly moved toward the bathroom — too scared to turn her back to her son.
She peered at the unimaginable bloodshed and began to scream, “Why? Why? Why? Why? He loves you. Why would you do this?’”
She called 911.
“Come quick,” she told the dispatcher. “My son killed my boyfriend.
“They said, ‘Can he be saved? … How do you know he’s dead?’
“I said, ‘He has no head.’ ”
Zayas then ran outside and waited for police, begging the arriving officers not to hurt her son.
The mother insists this tragedy was preventable if the medical system had worked for her several mentally ill son.
Doctors changed her son’s medications in January without notifying her, said Zayas, who claimed Damien went downhill after the switch.
She only found out when a CVS pharmacist pointed out that Damien needed to be weaned slowly off his previous medication, the antipsychotic drug Depakote.
She was never told what new meds he was supposed to be taking. Her son’s psychiatrist would not discuss treatment because Damien was now a legal adult.
“Why wouldn’t they tell us?” said Zayas. “They’re doctors. I’m sure they knew.”
Zayas insisted Casalaspro was not abusive — but said her son could be violent. He beat her last year, on her birthday, when she asked him to clean the kitchen, she said.
Damien started having mental health issues when he was only 6 — after his father went to prison, she said. He began hallucinating at age 13 — after being sexually abused by another student at a school in Queens, said Zayas, who declined to give more details.
He was diagnosed with PTSD and major depression, she said. He saw “shadow figures, very disturbing images, almost like horror movies,” she said. He would draw them for her.
That is when he was first prescribed antipsychotics.
Damien tried to kill himself twice, and was hospitalized twice, but by 14 was stable and on medication, she said.
“I’m just devastated,” she said. “My son wasn’t like this before. He was a good boy. Something is seriously wrong with him.”
When he was in high school, she was able to keep track of his doctors and medications. But despite her best efforts, she said she was cut out of the equation once he graduated in January and went into an adult mental-health program.
She attended his first two appointments with a new psychiatrist, but then her son told her she couldn’t come anymore.
“I didn’t even know what doctors he was going to,” the mom said. “I don’t even know if he was going to all the appointments. Every morning I remind him to take his medications. He said he was taking it.”
“We ask the public to with hold judgment,” said Gelormino. “Damien Hurstel is an extremely troubled young man with a long documented history of mental health issues. Our firm is aggressively trying pursue his psychiatric history so we can get a complete picture of the circumstances leading up this tragedy.”
She and Casalaspro, a city Sanitation worker, were in the process of buying a home not far from where they lived.
“I’m heartbroken,” she said. “Anthony was a great man. He was helping me raise my kids. He didn’t have to do that.”
