“I’m far from perfect,” a Chinatown man conceded today, as he was sentenced for strangling a beautiful young woman, then sleeping for two days with her decomposing body.
Michael Lenahan, 31, will serve 19 years to life for the 2007 murder of Lorna Santiago, 24, in the Confucius Plaza apartment he shared with his ailing grandmother.
“I’m far from a perfect person, but I am a good person,” the coke-addicted, out of work artist insisted to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon. ‘I am extremely sorry and extremely remorseful for what happened.”
Prosecutors say that after murdering Santiago, Lenahan spent two days surfing websites that dealt with sadomasochism and how to preserve dead bodies — and buying booze on her credit card.
When the body was finally discovered — by his mother — Lenahan lied to cops that he’d choked her to death “accidentally,” and had only intended to stop her from screaming and hitting him during an argument.
Prosecutors countered that, in order to have caused her death, Lenahan continued to choke Santiago for at least two minutes after she lost consciousness.
The grotesque murder left Santiago’s parents to literally “wither away,” said her only sibling, Rick, 36, of Alexandria, Va. “They are now resigned to perpetual sorrow,” he said, calling Lenahan, “A remorseless and soulless killer.”