'Removed brain with spoon': Mentally ill NYC teen beheads mom's boyfriend - mother recounts chilling chain of events

A Staten Island mother has described in harrowing detail how her mentally ill son allegedly killed and decapitated her boyfriend in their home earlier this week - an act she believes could have been prevented if his medical treatment had been properly managed.

According to The New York Post, 19-year-old Damien Hurstel confessed to stabbing and beheading his mother’s live-in boyfriend, Anthony Casalaspro, 45, inside their family apartment on Cary Avenue in West Brighton on Monday. Police have charged him with second-degree murder, manslaughter, and criminal possession of a weapon.

Authorities said the crime scene showed Casalaspro’s severed head beside his torso in a walk-in shower, with a saw, a bowl, and a spoon nearby. The Post reported that the handle of a silver-colored spoon was sticking out of the dismembered skull.


‘Do you want her to live?’ Teen’s chilling words to sister

In an interview with The Post, Hurstel’s mother Alicia Zayas recounted how her 16-year-old daughter, Bri, came face to face with her blood-soaked brother just moments after the killing.

“She said, ‘Are you gonna hurt mom?’” Zayas recalled her daughter asking. “And he said, ‘Do you want her to live?’ And she said, ‘Yes, please.’ He said, ‘Okay, she’ll live.’”

Bri then asked if she could leave the blood-splattered bathroom where, according to police sources cited by The Post, the victim’s brain had been partially removed with a spoon. “Are you gonna tell mom?” Damien asked his sister. “No,” she replied.

Bri fled the apartment, hid behind a backyard shed, and immediately called her mother. “She called me scared,” Zayas said. “I could hear it in her voice. I said, ‘Are you somewhere safe?’ She said, ‘Damien killed Anthony, and he doesn’t have a head.’”

‘Cleaning,’ said the accused as mother entered blood-soaked home

Zayas told The Post she rushed home to find the front door open. Before going inside, she warned her daughter, “If you don’t hear from me in two minutes, you need to call 911. Tell them to come quickly.”

Inside, she saw blood everywhere. Her son was in the kitchen. “His eyes looked different,” she recalled. “He has light eyes. The eyes looked dark. It looked weird. I said, ‘Damien, what’s going on? What’s wrong, honey? What are you doing?’”

“Cleaning,” Damien responded flatly, “as if he’s cleaning dishes, like it’s normal,” she said.

When Zayas asked where Casalaspro was, her son told her, “He’s in the bathroom. But you don’t want to go in there.”

“I said, ‘Well, Damien, I have to go in there. I have to see Anthony,’” she remembered. She walked slowly toward the bathroom, too frightened to turn her back to him.

“There’s blood everywhere,” she said. “I saw the scene and started screaming, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? He loves you. Why would you do this?’”

Zayas called 911. “Come quick,” she told the dispatcher. “My son killed my boyfriend. They said, ‘Can he be saved? … How do you know he’s dead?’ I said, ‘He has no head.’”

She then ran outside to wait for police and pleaded with responding officers not to harm her son.


Mother blames medical system for failure

Zayas told The Post that her son’s actions stemmed from untreated and mishandled mental illness. She said doctors had changed his medication in January without informing her, discontinuing Depakote, an antipsychotic he had been taking for years.

She discovered the change only when a CVS pharmacist told her Damien needed to be weaned off the old drug slowly. “Why wouldn’t they tell us?” Zayas said. “They’re doctors. I’m sure they knew.”

Once Damien turned 18, his psychiatrist refused to share treatment details with her due to privacy laws. “I didn’t even know what doctors he was going to,” Zayas said. “I don’t even know if he was going to all the appointments. Every morning I remind him to take his medications. He said he was taking it.”

Zayas said her son began showing mental health issues at age six, after his father went to prison. At 13, after being sexually abused by another student, he started hallucinating and was diagnosed with PTSD and major depression. “He saw shadow figures, very disturbing images, almost like horror movies,” she said. “He would draw them for me.”

He was first prescribed antipsychotics at that time and was hospitalized twice after suicide attempts. By 14, she said, he was stable and on medication. “I’m just devastated,” she said. “My son wasn’t like this before. He was a good boy. Something is seriously wrong with him.”

She added that Damien could sometimes be violent - once assaulting her on her birthday when she asked him to clean the kitchen - but insisted her boyfriend, Casalaspro, “was not abusive.”


‘We ask the public to withhold judgment’

Zayas’ attorneys, Mark Fonte and Louis Gelormino, said their firm is working to obtain Damien’s psychiatric records to understand what led to the killing. “We ask the public to withhold judgment,” said Gelormino. “Damien Hurstel is an extremely troubled young man with a long documented history of mental health issues.”

Zayas said she and Casalaspro, a city sanitation worker, had been planning to buy a home together. “I’m heartbroken,” she said. “Anthony was a great man. He was helping me raise my kids. He didn’t have to do that.”