The cruel acquaintance of an Upper East Side teacher trashed her family’s apartment and savagely murdered her beloved, 3-year-old Siamese cat last spring, according to a new, $2 million lawsuit.
Jessica Barrish’s college friend, Joseph Ari Chiesa, sneaked into her East 86th Street apartment, “tortured, mutilated and murdered Jessica’s companion animal, Cassie, and laid waste to the apartment,” according to the suit.
Upon her return home on May 13, 2012, “she found a paper towel covered in blood, a pair of pajamas which was spotted with blood, and blood splattered on the walls of the apartment and on the living room couch,” Barrish recounts in the Manhattan civil-court papers.
Chiesa pleaded guilty to “aggravated animal cruelty” in Manhattan Supreme Court last October and served four months in jail.
Barrish, 30, who had attended Wharton College in Massachusetts with Chiesa, had invited him to a 29th birthday party at her apartment on May 12, 2012. When she escorted her friends into cabs to continue partying, Chiesa, 29, stayed behind, smashed lamps, stole a $3,000 bracelet and repeatedly whacked the cat against a chair and a window screen.
But Chiesa 29, quickly crashed the celebration by guzzling booze, asking to snort cocaine, and calling a neighbor “fat” from the balcony, according to the suit.
“Cassie hid in the corner of Jessica’s bedroom and died of her injuries,” the court papers charge.She has “flashbacks from the scene and nightmares about it virtually every day since.”
Barrish, who lives with her psychologist mom in the rent-controlled apartment, wants $2 million in property damages and mental suffering and an order to prevent Chiesa from entering the building. Neither Chiesa nor his attorney returned calls for comment.