It was only a “tussle,” a “skirmish.” And at some point, he just “lost it.”
“You know, I just saw this blood, so much at the time,” Lower East Side killer Raul Barrera gripes in a chillingly minimizing and self-serving confession played publicly for the first time yesterday at a Manhattan presentencing hearing in his girlfriend’s murder.
“I don’t know; I lost it,” Barrera mumbles to a cop and a prosecutor in the half-hour taped confession, made five hours after he admittedly stabbed beautiful Lacoste sales manager Sarah Coit, 23, to death in her Clinton Street apartment by. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers presided over that plea and the two-day pre-sentencing hearing that concluded yesterday.The judge has set Oct. 29 for sentencing., when he’ll announce how much time Barrera will spend in prison — anywhere from 15 years to life, the mandatory minimum, to the maximum allowed by law, 25 years to life. Barrera is arguing that he deserves a sentencing break due to mental illness.