Metro

Stunner guilty of trying to kill boyfriend

Latvian hellcat Yekatrina Pusepa was found guilty on all counts Thursday morning in the bloody stabbing of her boyfriend.

Pusepa – who was photographed by The Post in her blood-stained shirt after the attack – was convicted of attempted murder and first-degree assault.

Dressed in a black blazer and beige pant with her hair tied in a braid, Pusepa, 23, stared stoically as Justice Marcy Kahn polled the jury, but bowed her head as they all repeated guilty.

She then clasped her hands together and broke down sobbing as the panel filed out of the courthouse inn Manhattan Supreme Court.

She faces up to 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge when she returns for sentencing Jan. 9.

Her wheelchair-bound grandmother, Tatiana Rylko, 93, who flew in from LA Wednesday, sobbed as she vowed to visit her granddaughter in prison.

“She defended herself!” she said in Russian.

Defense lawyer Kevin O’Connell said he would file a notice of appeal.

“We were disappointed in the verdict,” he said.

The jury started deliberating Wednesday morning and delivered their verdict at 10:35 a.m.

Pusepa had testified earlier she stabbed boyfriend Alec Katsnelson after he beat her following a night of heavy drinking at their usual downtown Manhattan watering hole, Ryan Maguire’s, on May 22, 2012, when she got up to go to the restroom.

“[I] asked him to look over my clutch, which had my phone, my keys and all my belongings,’’ Pusepa told jurors. “When I came out, I found my clutch was unattended in the middle of the bar.

“I went to go look for him, and he was outside,’’ she said. “At that point, I told him I wanted to go home because it frustrated me. I asked him to take care of something, and he was being irresponsible.”

The troubled pair went back to their Gold Street pad — but things took a horrible turn.

Prosecutors and Katsnelson, 23, say that after he received a phone message from another woman, Pusepa went berserk, stabbing him in the chest with a 9-inch steak knife, piercing his lungs and nicking his heart.

“You didn’t try to take a slice out of the arm, did you?’’ asked Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Leila Kermani.

“No,’’ Pusepa said.

“Instead, you put it directly in his chest,’’ Kermani stated, displaying for jurors The Post’s front-page photo of Pusepa crying after the attack, still dressed in her club clothes with a bloody palm print and other blood spatter clearly visible on her white top.

On the stand, Pusepa claimed that she knifed Katsnelson in a frenzy trying to protect herself from yet another vicious beating after months of violence.

“He was kicking me and started punching me, then hit me upside the head, and that’s when I grabbed the knife,’’ she said.

“He went to go swing at me again. That’s when I stabbed him.”

The defendant bowed her head, crying — but the prosecutor scoffed.

Kermani noted that on the night of the attack, Pusepa told one responding cop that a black man had stabbed her lover, and told another officer that the victim was suicidal and grabbed her own hand to stab himself with the knife she was holding.

“I was just scared and in shock. I was just not in the right state of mind,” she said.

O’Connell told jurors that when his client knifed her abusive boyfriend, she was simply trying to “back him off.’’

But Kermani insisted, “She was already boiling at that point, and he pushed her over the edge, and in that instant, she formed an intent to kill.’’