Inmate Who Beheaded Mom Slashes Rikers CO, Breaks His Nose

An inmate convicted of cutting his mother’s head off and taking a selfie with it slashed a Correction Officer’s face the day before he was scheduled to be shipped to a prison upstate.

Bahsid McLean, 27, was sentenced to 25 years to life for murdering his mother, Tanya Byrd, 52, in their Bronx apartment in February 2013. He then dismembered her with a two-foot power saw and took a photo of himself with her severed head. They had argued about his parenting skills, prosecutors said.

“If you can kill somebody, you should be able to cut them up, too,” Mr. McLean told authorities after his arrest, according to a video played at his trial in October in Bronx Supreme Court. “If you don’t have the stomach to cut them up, then you’re a coward.”

Mr. McLean slashed Correction Officer Matthew Hines above the left eye and on his forehead and also broke his nose at the West Facility on Rikers Island about 7:15 p.m. Dec. 14, the Daily News reported.

Mr. Hines’s fiancée, Me­l­anie Brody, told WPIX-11 that he had been transferred to West Facility, which houses some of the jail’s most violent inmates, a week before the assault. She said most officers at West Facility have pepper spray and a baton but he was not issued them.

“Tonight’s assault on one of our Correction Officers assigned to the West Facility on Rikers Island is another grim reminder that crime is soaring in the city’s jails,” said Elias Husamudeen, presi­dent of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association. “There won’t be any marches in the streets of New York to express public outrage when a dedicated Correction Officer is slashed above the eye by a convicted murderer with a mental illness.”

‘Make Rikers Safe Now’

He continued, “Instead of calling for shutting down Rikers Island years from now, let’s call for making Rikers Island safer for Correction Officers and everyone else immediately. How can we succeed in keeping this city safe if the city fails to protect us?”

COBA and two other unions representing Correction supervisors have expressed dissatisfaction at limits on solitary confinement they say have made the jails more dangerous. The de Blasio administration, which has spent millions of dollars beefing up uniformed staff as well as educational and counseling programs for inmates, maintains that violence in the jails is going down.

Policy in the Department of Correction and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office calls for inmates to be char­ged separately for crimes committed on Rikers Island. But the DA’s Office said Dec. 21 that Mr. McLean had not been charged in the assault on CO Hines.

He is one of the rising number of Rikers inmates with a mental-health diagnosis. He has spent much of his life in mental hospitals. He said on the video shown at his trial that he wasn’t worried about going to prison for his mother’s murder. He can live in a parallel universe inside his head, he said, where he is a lawyer with a family, a nice house and a dog.

“I wouldn’t be in jail. Not up here, I’m not,” he said on the video, pointing at his head.