Metro

Mom of schizophrenic asks for mercy — even though son killed her husband

Her husband was slashed to death with a sushi knife — by her own schizophrenic son — and still an Upper West Side mom begged for mercy at his emotional sentencing today.

“It’s unspeakably sad that his life was cut short by my son’s hand,” Valerie Kurita told a judge of her husband, 70-year-old Fumitaka — as her youngest son, Julian, 35, looked on grimly from the defense table.

“At the outset it was hard to know what to pray for,” she said. Still, she realized that Fumitaka — slashed across the throat from behind after setting the table for dinner — had fallen victim to the son’s delusions and paranoia.

“Julian believed his parents were conspiring to have him tortured and beaten,” the mom told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon. “If I believed anything other than mental illness caused this, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help him.”

The judge gave Kurita the minimum sentence allowed by law — 15 years to life. Julian’s lawyer, Norman Williams, had tried to convince a jury in May that Kurita was not responsible for the murder by reason of insanity, but the judge called the guilty verdict just.

“I believe that the defendant was guilty of intentional murder,” the judge said, “but I strongly believe that the defendant’s actions on July 19, 2010 were the direct result of mental illness.”