A Manhattan jury is about to decide the fate of Tyrese Haspil, the 25-year-old former personal assistant on trial for the brutal murder of his boss, tech CEO Fahim Saleh.
An attorney for Haspil, who has been standing trial in New York Supreme Criminal Court, argued that he was so in love with his girlfriend and terrified that she would leave him, he became extremely emotionally disturbed, leading him to kill Saleh.
But prosecutors said Haspil was active on Bumble, a popular dating app, while he was dating his girlfriend — attempting to undermine claims that he was mad with his love for her at the time of the killing.
During closing arguments at the start of the day, public defender Sam Roberts argued Haspil deserved the jury’s “deliberate, comprehensive consideration of why” he slayed his former boss, whose family sat stoically in the pews of the courtroom gallery.
“Why did Tyrese do this terrible, irrevocable thing? Why? That’s the only major question,” Roberts told the jury, arguing that his client was suffering from extreme emotional disturbance, or EED.
If the jury buys it, Haspil would be guilty of manslaughter instead of murder, significantly reducing his prison sentence.
Saleh was the CEO of Gokada, a ride-hailing and delivery service Gokada based in Nigeria.
Saleh’s cousin found him beheaded and dismembered in his $2.4 million Lower Manhattan condo on July 14, 2020.
Haspil, his former personal assistant, admitted after his arrest to stabbing Saleh to death to hide a $400,000 embezzlement, and then sawing him into six pieces to hide his corpse.
Roberts tried to convince the jury that, for Haspil, the thought of potentially being abandoned by his girlfriend was “worse than the thought of killing this innocent person.” Haspil was so compelled by “his first real relationship” with Marine Chauveau, who was about to return to France upon her visa’s expiration, that he had to embezzle his boss’s money to shower her with gifts for her birthday.
“However warped it may seem to us,” Roberts said, “for Tyrese, Marine was his whole world.”
Haspil had spent years embezzling from Saleh, who was giving him a chance to pay the money back without getting the police involved. Those thefts spiked when he got into the relationship, Roberts told the jury, referencing a graph of the embezzlements over time.
In his extremely emotionally disturbed state, Haspil believed homicide was his only path forward because “it would provide a little more time” with his girlfriend before he would inevitably go to prison for embezzlement, Roberts said.
When it was the government’s turn to make closing arguments, prosecutor Linda Ford popped the love bubble.
Not only did Haspil plan the murder months in advance, Ford argued, but he was also on Bumble while he was supposedly obsessively in love with his girlfriend.
“This is about his lifestyle,” Ford said, underscoring how Haspil lived in a penthouse and traveled by helicopter before he even met Chauveau. “This is not about a birthday party. This is about murdering Fahim Saleh.”
After closing arguments, Judge April Newbauer told the jury they would begin deliberations Monday morning.
