Twenty years ago, his son was handsome, smart, athletic — and then madness took over, the father of Upper East Side cleaver killer David Tarloff told his son’s murder jury today.
“My goal was always to get him to stay in the hospital,” Leonard Tarloff, 77, of Staten Island, testified, his voice repeatedly choking with emotion.
“I felt it was the only way to deal with this horrible disease — ” he said, halting to gasp and sigh deeply on the witness stand in Manhattan Supreme Court. “This horrible disease that was taking my son away from me,” he said.
The father’s testimony, and that of Tarloff’s only sibling, his brother Robert, 43, came at the start of Tarloff’s insanity defense case, and described his tragic spiral into paranoid schizophrenia in the two decades before he admittedly attacked a psychiatrist and a psychologist with a cleaver, mallet and kitchen knife.
The lawyers are hoping to prove that Tarloff was so mentally ill in February, 2008, that he did not know he was doing anything wrong when he bludgeoned and stabbed Dr. Kathryn Faughey to death in her 79th Street office, and nearly stabbed to death her colleague, Dr. Kent Shinbach, when he bravely came to her aid.
“I remember one time he was in our apartment and he was 22, 23 years old, and he’s standing there buck naked in front of our mother and just throwing eggs at the wall and just screaming random things,” Robert recalled of one of his older brother’s outbursts in their Rego Park, Queens, apartment.
Prosecutors are striving to show Tarloff as manipulative and directed in his outbursts — using them to get what he wanted. His violence was consciously directed against people who stood in his way, prosecutors have promised jurors they will show.
Tarloff — who has been institutionalized more than 20 times — registered no reaction from his seat at the defense table as his father and brother testified on his behalf. He faces life in prison if convicted of murder, and an indefinite term in a psychiatric prison if found not guilty.