An unhinged actor Thursday calmly described hacking his beloved mother to death with a sword because he believed a demon had taken hold of her soul.
“I didn’t kill her. I killed the demon inside her,” Michael Brea said in a chilling hourlong interview with the Daily News in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital.
Graphic pic of crime scene after the jump….
When told his mother, Yannick Brea, 55, had died in the grisly assault early Tuesday, Michael was unrepentant.
“So be it. It was the work of God,” he said.
Speaking with white-hot intensity and unflinching confidence, Brea described a shadowy descent into a world filled with Masonic symbolism and black magic beginning late Sunday when he snapped awake.
“I was sleeping in my bedroom. God came above my bed and reached his arm to me,” said Brea, wearing a light-blue prison jumpsuit and slippers. He told his tale while sitting unhandcuffed on a blue chair behind a wood table.
“I said, ‘God, is my time on earth over?’ I heard a voice say, ‘Yes Michael, today is your last day.’ I asked if I could say goodbye to my family.”
The 31-year-old Brea said he told no one about the dream, but the following afternoon, he said he received another sign while at the Prince Hall Masonic Temple in Harlem, which he’d joined a week earlier.
There, he said, a man approached and tried to put a curse on him.
“[He] kept trying to put something in my hand but wouldn’t show it to me. I kept opening my hand. It was a Freemason pin. I wouldn’t touch it,” Brea said.
Felt like Neo from ‘The Matrix’
He began feeling ill and left, and while riding the train back to Brooklyn, he said, strangers began speaking to him about his mother.
“I felt like Neo from ‘The Matrix.’ I began hearing voices and feeling powerful,” Brea said. “They were asking about the difference between mom and mother. It was a sign.”
When he returned to the family’s Prospect Heights apartment, the bit-part actor who once appeared on “Ugly Betty,” hugged his mother, a God-fearing Haitian immigrant with whom relatives say he had long been very close.
“I knew I would never see my mother again,” he said. “I gave her lots of love.”
He went to his room and lit candles, placed a dagger and a 3-foot ceremonial Freemason sword by his side.
Investigators said he had stolen the sword from the Masonic lodge, but Brea insisted his father had given it to him when he was a child.
“It’s a powerful sword,” he said.
Brea also arranged three saint cards around him – including one of Saint Jude holding a sword.
His mother then knocked on the door and asked him to go to the kitchen and pour water from a pot in which she was cooking three chickens.
Credits: DelMundo for News
Credits: Nicastro for News
BYÂ MATTHEW LYSIAK
