The last time Yekatrina Pusepa saw her boyfriend, she was shrieking hysterically outside his Financial District apartment, her midriff-baring T-shirt smeared with his blood.
Thursday, the weepy Latvian lovely saw Alec Katsnelson, 23, again, this time as she sat at the defense table of a Manhattan courtroom and he took the stand to describe how in May 2012 she had come at him with a steak knife in either fist.
Her face was red with rage, he told jurors, because another woman had just texted him a nude photo.
“I f—ing hate you!” he remembered Pusepa screaming at him in his living room, her knives at the ready.
“I smacked [one] knife out of her hand,” he remembered of ridding the raging woman of the blade in her left fist.
“I’m not sure where it went. It flew.”
Turns out Katsnelson had picked the wrong knife.
Pusepa is right handed, and that’s the hand she then stabbed him with.
“He saw blood pouring out of his chest,” assistant district attorney Virginia Nguyen told jurors in opening statements earlier Thursday, calling the stabbing an attempted murder.
“He thought he had taken his last breath,” she said of Katsnelson, who would wake up in Bellevue Hospital with eight tubes protruding from his body.
Pusepa told two whoppers to cops as she stood blood-stained and sobbing outside the apartment at Gold and Fulton streets — first claiming that an “intruder” had stabbed Katsnelson, and then claiming that he stabbed himself with a “butter knife.”
The defense, meanwhile, is insisting that Pusepa did stab Katsnelson, but in self defense.
“This is not a match made in heaven,” conceded defense lawyer Kevin O’Connell in his own openings.
Pusepa faces a potential maximum sentence of 25 years prison. In May of this year, she turned down the DA’s offer of 10 years prison in exchange for her admitting she tried to murder Katsnelson.