NEW YORK _ An executive assistant to global tech magnate Fahim Saleh was charged Friday with the grisly murder of his boss after embezzling $100,000 from the multimillionaire victim _ whose dismembered and decapitated corpse sat for two days inside a ritzy Manhattan condo, police said.
Former employee Tyrese Devon Haspil, 21, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of the 33-year-old tech CEO, discovered Tuesday in the living room of his $2 million Lower East Side apartment, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison in a brief news conference.
Saleh was attacked at about 1:45 p.m. on Monday as he exited a private elevator into his seventh-floor apartment. The dead man's cousin made the gruesome discovery a day later, according to Harrison.
Haspil, whose duties included handling Saleh's finances and personal business, opted to kill his boss rather than settle his debt, according to sources.
Saleh was willing to work out a deal in which Haspil could pay back the stolen cash without any criminal charges. But the plan fell apart when the assistant decided to erase the debt with a Taser, a knife and an electric saw, the sources said.
Harrison took no questions from reporters about the high-profile murder.
Police said an assassin, dressed in a ninja mask, expensive suit and tie, zapped the victim and fatally stabbed him in the neck and chest before carving up the body with a saw purchased with Haspil's credit card. The killer fled the scene just before the relative discovered Saleh's corpse.
It wasn't immediately clear if Haspil was the actual killer, and a source said the suspect asked for a lawyer right away and made no statements.
Haspil used his credit card to purchase the saw used to dismember Saleh's body, according to sources. The power tool was left behind in the apartment.
A Taser prong found on Saleh's body bore a serial number that also connected Haspil to the murder, sources said.
Haspil has no criminal record, according to sources.
Stunned neighbors watched as detectives descended on the suspect's Brooklyn apartment near Prospect Park.
"To think the guy who may have done this lived two floors below me," said photographer Lisa Hancock, 53. "It was just so brutal, and it sounds like it was planned. ... It's shocking. It's crazy."
Cops had theorized that the killer intended to remove the body and scrub the crime scene clean _ but bolted down the stairs as the cousin rode the elevator up to the E. Houston St. condo.
Saleh co-founded the Nigerian motorcycle ride-sharing service Gokada.
"There are no words or actions to provide any of us comfort except the capture of the person who exhibited nothing short of evil upon our loved one," the family said in a statement to the New York Daily News on Thursday.
