Crazy? Or calculating?
Tomorrow a Manhattan murder jury will begin deliberating the fate of the cleaver-swinging schizophrenic who raged through an Upper East Side psychiatric office five years ago — deciding if he’ll be sent to prison or a locked psych ward.
The robbery-turned-bloodbath spawned by David Tarloff, 45, left psychologist Kathryn Faughey, 56, stabbed dead on her office carpet. Her psychiatrist colleague, Dr. Kent Shinbach, 75, nearly bled to death after heroically coming to her aid.
In pressing their insanity defense, Tarloff’s defense lawyers told jurors in closing arguments today that the Messianic, out-of-work Queens telemarketer believed during the attack that his actions were sanctioned by God.
“When God tells you to do something, or when God sanctions something, you do it,” the lawyer, Bryan Konoski, told the jury, insisting that the “floridly psychotic” David Tarloff did not know his actions were wrong.
“We may not all understand fully, because we don’t have a schizophrenic mind,” the lawyer said, gesturing toward Tarloff, who has sat at the defense table muttering under his breath or staring vacantly throughout the month-long trial..
“None of us, fortunately, live in that man’s mind,” the lawyer told jurors.
But prosecutors presented strong evidence that Tarloff has repeatedly — despite his mental illness — used violence and temper tantrums so as to intentionally get his way — and is nothing more than a murderer in a botched robbery.
Tarloff repeatedly demonstrated he knew it was wrong to plunge a boning knife into a woman’s chest, prosecutor Evan Krutoy told jurors in his own closing arguments today.
According to testimony and evidence, Tarloff used an alias during the attack, and afterward discarded his bloody clothes. Arrested days later, Tarloff asked cops if he would get a cell to himself, or have to share one, among other rational questions.
“He’s asking, ‘What’s a buccal swab. When do I see an attorney. What’s the difference between murder one and murder two,” Krutoy told jurors. “He’s asking all these questions that you would ask and that I would ask, because we’re reasonable.”
Tarloff also emphatically protested to police, “I wasn’t going to hurt anyone — I swear to God on my mother’s life!” Krutoy argued.
“He knows it was a bloodbath in that office,” the prosecutor told jurors. “Watch that [police] video. He knows it was wrong.”
Tarloff had spent two decades bouncing between no fewer than 21 mental institutionalizations and his mother’s apartment in Forest Hills.
In February, 2008, he packed a cheap kitchen knives set — including the bread knife and sharpener — a mallet, rope, duct tape, and clothing for himself and his mother, and rolled them in two suitcases to the East 79th Street offices of Shinbach, the first psychiatrist to ever treat him.
He later explained to shrinks and cops that he wanted to force Shinbach to give him his ATM pin number so he could withdraw $40,000, rescue his mother from a hospital and buy her a villa in Hawaii.
Tarloff believed at the time that his mother would die if he didn’t save her, and “his mother’s circumstances cracked that man,” the defense lawyer told jurors.
He faces life in prison if convicted, and an indeterminate institutionalization in a secure psychiatric jail if found not guilty by reason of insanity.