An unhinged Brooklyn man with a history of mental problems stabbed his mother to death — viciously slicing her more than 40 times — then called the 911 to confess, police said today.
“I just killed my mother,” Richard Cohen, 31, told the dispatcher after butchering his mother, Anne, in the grisly attack in his Kensington apartment late Saturday, according to law-enforcement sources.
When police arrived, they found the psychopath standing over her body, the sources added.
“I killed her,” he repeated.
The 64-year-old woman was taken to New York Community Hospital, where she was pronounced dead, cops said.
The pair had fought over money, cops said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly added that there was a history of violence between the two.
“There was a record of domestic violence in that household, particularly between the son and the mother,” Kelly told reporters before the start of the Dominican Day Parade on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
A neighbor said that the trouble man had once held his mother hostage at her Bath Beach, Brooklyn, apartment.
“Richard is a little off. It’s not the first incident. He had his mother at knife-point in the house a couple years back,” said Betsy Fares, 48, a longtime neighbor of the victim.
Cohen had been on medication and under the care of a doctor, cops said. It was unclear what mental condition he suffers from or whether he was on his meds at the time of the slaying.
Fares said he constantly fought with his mother over money.
Cohen was recently trying to get money for a security deposit for a new apartment, law-enforcement sources said.
“From what his mother says, he had lost his job a while ago, and she was giving him money. But it was never enough for his girlfriend and him,” Fares said. “[He and his mother] were always fighting. Every time he came here, it was for money, money, money — and she gave it to him. She was a good mother.”
Anne Cohen, whose psychiatrist husband died seven years ago, had sold the family house in the past few years and was living in an apartment with her other son, Michel, Fares said. Richard moved out a couple years after his father died, she said.
“It’s a shame. Now this poor kid that’s left has nobody,’’ the neighbor said.
Detectives interviewed Cohen at the 70th Precinct Sunday afternoon, and he was later held without bail.
Additional reporting by Sally Goldenberg